Capital One Over Limit Alerts

Role: Primary UX/UI Designer

Length: January 2020 - July 2020

Tools: Figma

📔 Project Overview

Capital One aims to provide a seamless spending experience for their cardholders. One of the main barriers/disruptions to a credit card experience is when a customer goes over their credit limit. I was the primary UX/UI designer for a mobile alerts team aimed to minimize card disruption and provide an intuitive and integrated experience for our customers. Our motto is “The Card Always Works!”

While I left the team in 2020, I worked on many experiences past the MVP that I cannot post online because they are not in flight. I can provide further information upon request.

✏️ Responsibilities

  • Mapping out our phased implementation of our alerts strategy to provide visuals for key business and product partners

  • Creating user journeys and flows for multiple channels and types of alerts

  • Designing interactive prototypes for user testing

Problem Space

 

⚡️The Challenge: How do we encourage customers to make payments if they are approaching or over their credit limit?

 

Every year, premium Capital One cardholders are declined 12 million times for a total of $4 Billion in lost purchases. Not only are these declines damaging financially, but they also create an extremely negative experience for customers - one that can have irreversible impacts on how customers view Capital One.

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George isn’t the only customer who feels this way. Embarrassing, and the worst feeling were other common descriptions of customers’ experience with credit card declines. So how do we prevent this from happening, and if it does happen, how can we resolve the issue as quickly as possible? Our alerts strategy revolved around:

  • Pre-empting declines by driving awareness early when a customer nears their limit

  • Reaching customers quickly after a decline to reduce confusion and frustration

  • Creating a seamless payment experience so customers can go back to spending

 DESIGN

A Multi-Channel Experience

Working with product, we identified three different types of alerts to release for our MVP.

  • Approaching Over Limit

    • Aimed at customers who are nearing their credit limit to prompt them to make a payment

  • Over Limit Declined

    • Customers who are declined over their limit need to be able to quickly make a payment so they can get below

  • Over Limit Approved

    • Customers who are approved to go over their limit need to know how much they went over, and the ability to make a payment

We decided to push these alerts through three different channels: push notification, email, and text, to meet our customers’ wide variety of needs and preferences.

I created a flow depicting the customer journey through these three alerts throughout all of our different channels.. These base visuals are key to lay out as the alerts suite gets more complicated and refined past the MVP. Regardless of the type of alert or channel, the constant is that we are driving users to remediate the issue by making a payment as soon as possible.

  DESIGN

A Closer Look

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No matter what type of alert a customer is receiving, we route them to the same payments flow. In order to build positive behaviors in our customers, consistency in our designs is key. Especially with an experience that we know has such a large impact on customers’ perception of Capital One, our designs need to be familiar and reliable.

I worked across teams with the designers and product managers on the Payments Team in order to ensure that for our MVP, we had payment options that resonated with users, and high visibility placement of the “Make a Payment” CTA.

 Impact

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We launch our MVP suite of alerts in Q3 2020, and saw very encouraging results. The alerts were reducing declines, increasing payments, and unlocking spend. Across our targeted areas for improving customer experience, the alerts proved to be very effective.

Moving forward, our areas of opportunity are:

  • Real-Time Payment Processing (same-day payments are not effective if they don’t immediately post)

  • Anticipating Declines in the Right Moment (40% of declines are from recurring charges)

  • Personalizing Payment Solutions (increasing the options on our payments screen)

I wireframed, designed, and tested experiences for these opportunity areas, however since they have not been released I cannot post them online. Contact me if you would like more information!