content-process

When I first landed on the Capital One design team, I was introduced to our seriously messy legacy process for getting content and design approved by legal, compliance, and all of the other stakeholders involved in each particular project. This process is necessarily rigorous (after all, it’s a highly regulated bank), but it didn’t make sense for digital design work. It hadn’t evolved to meet the teams and type of work it was in service of, and because of that, was very broken.

The existing process involved taking screenshots of design comps or live pages, and pasting them into an excel spreadsheet. New, updated copy would be added in a cell next to the pasted image. Then, this enormous Excel file would be emailed around to different stakeholders, who would all make updates and edits to the copy and send it back. The first of these Excel spreadsheets I saw was labeled “Version 32”.

I’m sure you can imagine what could go wrong here. We knew there had to be a better way. Our team's content strategist and I set out to understand this process in it's entirety, so that we could fix it.

Stakeholder Interviews

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Initially, we spoke with 15 employees (stakeholders) who were engaged in this legacy process to gain an understanding of the pain points, as well as any upsides. These stakeholders were from legal, compliance, brand, design, operations, and tech.

Here's a quick summary:

• The documentation (Excel + email threads that could last for months) was cumbersome to maintain

• Versioning became complicated and confusing

• The original content would not be in the final version, without any context for why changes were made.

Process Blueprint Creation

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I created a process blueprint to help us describe what we saw happening visually. We used this as a way to socialize our findings intra-team, and to other departments.

Optimizing the Process

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How could we streamline this approval & distribution process, so that the integrity of the content was upheld throughout the review process, and documentation and versioning could be easily maintained?

The ultimate goals were to:

• Reduce time allotted to updating and re-updating the new content, whether in design prototypes or dev environments

• Allow for a maintainable historical record of any changes

• Create an approval process that involves less time from each stakeholder

• Open up lines of communication between stakeholders, so that we were all in sync with what needed to be changed

From the outset, we knew that Excel was not the right tool for this process. After considering what we’d learned from our stakeholder interviews, we decided to pilot a new process using a tool designers already know and love: InVision. It is a design prototyping tool that just so happened to have all the features we needed for our process: versioning for keeping a historical record, approvable commenting for copy suggestions, and fully-workable prototypes to give stakeholders context for the entirety of the flow.

We also had to consider how the people involved in this process interacted with each other. Much of our redesign involved creating new communication channels between teams and different parts of the business.

Initial Pilot & Process Rollout

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We created a new process utilizing InVision as the primary 'source of truth' for all content. We kicked off with an initial pilot project. The effort included running workshops to get everyone up to speed on how to use the tool in this new process, and creating a step-by-step guide for all stakeholders involve.

We learned quite a bit from that initial pilot, and made tweaks to our system accordingly.

Over the past year, this new process has been fully integrated across all of our Card Partnerships digital design projects, and has completely eliminated production delays as compared to the average of 12 delays per year experienced with the previous process.