Developing a new line of business within a bank
Capital One was expanding their product portfolio and wanted to explore profitable product propositions they could develop to service shifting customer needs and borrowing behaviours.
Explore, design and build an unsecured lending proposition and experience that meets evolving customer needs and borrowing preferences, expands into new customer segments and creates a new, multi-million pound line of business.
There was a completed business case for a development of a Personal Loans product including a complete service blueprint, 3 unique product propositions, go to market strategy, PL forecasts, an end-to-end user experience flow, and a 5 year product development roadmap.
The business was set up for an expansion into new market segments with an estimated £1bn turnover from new products in 5 years, helping the business to expand to become a top 5 UK lender by outstandings in 4 years.
Product design lead
Desk research, in-depth interviews, quantitative surveys, data analysis , HMWs, ideation, brainstorm, design scorecard, journey map, service blueprint, prototyping, roadmap, user-testing, presentation.
Process
Discovery
To kick off our project, our newly formed "empowered" team facilitated a quantitative study to better understand customer demand and current experience pain points from previous or current loan providers.
We analysed the data, transforming into insight on market opportunities, desirable product propositions and core customer needs.
From the initial research I worked with a cross-functional team of Business Analysts, Software Engineers, Design Strategists and Data Analysts to decide which lending product would provide a desirable, feasible and viable investment for Capital One and align on three customer-centric product principles for designing a desirable and differentiated product proposition:
- Flexible
- Convenient
- Predictable
Ideation
I used insight on customer experience with competitor products to create a Customer Journey Map to help illustrate core opportunities for customer-centric innovation. I then transformed the Insight and Customer Journey Map into HMW statements which I used in a facilitated ideation workshop with product managers, software engineers and visual designers to generate 6 different design concepts which included:
- Decreasing Rates Over Time
- Giving Back Unused Funds
- Suggested Overpayments
Partnering with a Design Strategist I evolved the design concepts into testable prototypes. Utilising some initial research findings, we began to visualise our concepts through some low fidelity user interface designs.
Testing
I participated in an initial round of interviews to gather feedback from customers on the desirability of the concepts.
Following the feedback I co-led a cross functional team through iteration on the concepts. We improved the product concepts and repeated the research and gathered additional insight on desirability and usability of the concepts and also tested branded value propositions to understand compelling messaging.
Development
Finally, our cross-functional team gathered together and used the Design Scorecard method to prioritise concepts for further development and delivery. This scorecard included customer desirability, technological feasibility and commercial viability. As we were developing new product propositions in a regulated environment we adapted the scorecard to incorporate a business risk rating to illustrate the level of impact each concept would have on credit policy.
The final concepts developed through this process focused on product innovation around three core customer journeys where there were unmet customer needs by existing market propositions:
- Flexible Refinancing
- Convenient Fund Release
- Predictable Repayment Structures
Throughout this rigorous process I funnelled our design concepts and research findings into a complete end-to-end user journey flow with high fidelity screens.
