Creating tools to improve credit graduation
Capital One provides a low-credit limit product to those customers who do not qualify for its Classic Card. Capital One wanted to increase the graduation rate of it’s Starter Card customers. Graduation can be achieved by spending and sticking to the limit, paying on time and consecutively, and keeping finances in shape.
Understand the customer needs and business value of the Starter Card product, develop and test experiences to define a long term lift in graduation.
A suite of features and experiences developed within a roadmap to improve and streamline customer experience, credit understanding and graduation.
Unfortunately the Starter Card program was turned off before live results could be measured, however early testing proved the viability of a successful program.
Product design lead
Desk research, HMWs, brainstorm facilitation, journey map, prototyping, user-testing, road mapping, presentation.
Process
Discovery
I began my research by delving into pre-existing insights to gain a solid understanding of the Starter Card product offering and create customer persona profiles from our internal experience hub. Analysing pain points and needs I quickly built a picture of each customer types’ behaviours and characteristics.
Credit Rebuilder
These people have been burned by credit before. Rebuilding may feel like a lot of hard work but are glad for a fair second chance. They are ready to get their score up though and want the opportunity to prove themselves and succeed.
First Timer
These people are new to credit. They have little knowledge of how credit cards work and want a safe space to learn. They recognise credit will be useful but may be worried of the impact it could have on their life.
I then sourced existing journey maps to better understand the onboarding journey and customer communications to see what opportunities were possible to help customers succeed.
Ideation
Using these insights I quickly moved on to gather partners together for an ideation workshop. As facilitator I organised and led the session to include lightning talks, views of the journey, our hypothesis and HMWs, steering the focus of the workshop to populate concepts and realise opportunities for testing.
Ideas from the workshop were dot votted and the result was four strong concepts:
- Introduction/overview of the Starter Card program
- Missed payment messaging
- Program progress tracker
- Card utilisation
Testing
Taking advantage of our monthly rolling research session, I brought in the low-fidelity concepts for a first round of testing to gauge customer’s understanding and appeal of the Starter Card program.
Overall the participants responded well to the designs presented. There was a common theme of wanting more information and a more serious approach when talking about credit. Especially, where a customer might have gone wrong and needs vital information to make amends. Most participants understood the concept of a Starter Card product and appreciated the effort by a credit provider to help educate, provide guidance and differentiate between card product offerings as a way of “leveling up”.
Learning from the first round of testing I further developed the concepts and produced high-fidelity prototypes for a second round of validation.
Development
Through our iterative discovery, ideation and testing I was able to validate a suite of features and experiences to enable and empower the Starter Card customer to complete their credit improvement journey.
