Timeline 3 months
Team size 3 designers
Deliverables responsive web
Consultancy Moment

My contributions
Development documentation, support and QA
Sprint and scope definition
Project management
Prototype generation
Stakeholder communications
Usability testing, both remote and in-person
UX / UI design

Capital One

A new group formed within Capital One named Account Management, with an agenda of both tactical design solutions in digital products and long term product strategy. The Account Management team were facing the challenge of proving their role within the consumer banking side, amongst a few other groups tackling similar problems.

We were tasked with a few responsibilities: provide tactical designs for key features on web, pressure test a new design platform known as EASE, and define the design process for the new group to scale internally.

The org structure under the EASE platform, with the location of our client group.

EASE was a newly defined and released design and dev framework that would serve as the foundation for all consumer facing digital products. It was in the early stages of rollout, so we had the opportunity to build on and refine the system through our work.

One of our first deliverables to the group was a visualization of our collaborative design process. With input from the Capital One team about their internal processes, we were able to put together a plan that worked for both sides.

An additional lens for consideration was the role of each team (product, dev, design) at each step.

At the start of every sprint we'd kick it off with a grooming session. Based on user stories sent over from the product managers, we'd construct a low-fi outline for conversation, questions and scope alignment.

An output of these sprint kickoff sessions was a rough plan turned digital. It'd then be mapped against our other sprints, as well as a parallel track of research work.

Often our sprints would begin with collaborative sketching sessions with the Cap One team. Product, design and SEO would travel up from DC for a few days for a design jam at our NYC offices. We'd spend a day co-creating, refining and giving feedback on each other's work.

One of the team tools we leveraged to rapidly create concepts was a toolkit of sketch fidelity components, and a handwritten font. It allowed for multiple people to generate ideas in the same fidelity and style, while obscuring the creator so feedback wasn't impacted.

The Cap One DC office had a dedicated department for research. We were able to leverage the full suite of testing needs—recruiting, recording, private interview rooms, NDAs, incentives— to evaluate some of our concepts.

The Outcome

Our design solutions on web were released over time to users and evaluated for effectiveness. The additional concepts we tested with users for travel notifications and freezing cards were incorporated into the Capital One 360 Banking apps across iOS and Android.

The second engagement with our client team focused on the longer term product strategy of Account Management. We built upon and continued to test design concepts that came out strong from the parallel team's research efforts.