21:34:03 UTC
Project 01
Pre-Approved Mastercard
Lead designer
Brief
Provide clients (new and returning) the convenience of a credit-based pre-approval process for specific Mastercard offerings that could be started from anywhere without the support of an ATB team member.
PLATFORMS
Web
PROJECT TIMELINE
1 month
OVERVIEW
The PAMC project was my first experience with ATB's Digital Onboarding portfolio, and was a fun challenge trying to balance the various risk and technical constraints without harming the overall user experience. The auto-approval process required intermittent checks against a user's credit score to gauge the offers that would be presented to the user, which meant we needed to design a user flow that would be helpful and usable regardless of how the system rated a user's credit score.
PROCESS — USER FLOW MAPPING
To reduce the amount of time spent churning through ideas and allowing our refinement sessions to begin as soon as possible, I put together a rough map of the proposed flow. This allowed the product manager, the lead developer, and I to anticipate how we might segment the information that would be required on each page.
OPPORTUNITY
Fraud and user error concerns pushed us to require users to pick up their Mastercard in-branch if they recently changed their address. This gave us the opportunity to provide users with the option to tailor their pickup/delivery method based on what worked best for them.
PROCESS — SKETCHING
Next, I moved to sketching out rough concepts that would be used for the purpose of brainstorming ideas with the product manager and as illustrated examples to check for technical concerns with the lead developers on the project.
DESIGN
The flow required a large amount of information to be entered by the user. To help split the information sections up, I divided the flow into several pages and fashioned a sidebar to allow them to be more navigable and signal to the user the application process.
Finding out that a largely automated process would require you (the user) to travel to a branch in order to receive your new card can be a downer. We wanted to alleviate additional stress by allowing users to input their location into our location API, which would automatically provide them a number of branch locations without requiring them to manually search for them.
OPPORTUNITY
We identified a subset of users who actually wanted to pick up their card in-branch, even if they weren't required. What started as a way to alleviate the stress of an bothersome edge case provided an opportunity to give users a useful secondary option for receiving their cards.
Because the flow was so dependent on real-time validation of the information that was being entered, there would be an edge case where some users would be rejected. We recognized that this would be a terrible user experience; some users would receive the initial email offer only to be rejected after investing time into the application process. We wanted to help offset this bad experience by providing a consolation flow—apologizing for the denial and offering alternative great deals instead. Not a perfect solution, but one that we felt was important to include.
RECAP
The PAMC project felt like a step forward in my growth as a product designer. Many of the previous lessons that I had learned around ideating as early as possible, keeping technical feasibility in mind, conferring with partner groups (product management, development, and SMEs) helped ensure the project went smoothly. What was expected to take a month or more to refine was handed off to development in a little over three weeks.
REFLECTIONS
As happy as I am with the planning and execution of the work, if I could do it over, I would push for testing right after the ideation phase had completed. Our product success group was by nature very client-centric, but testing would have given us that little bit of confidence that I believe would have helped condense our decision-making processes in the middle stretch.
Another big lesson: sometimes there are small effort/big wins at every stage of the design process. Sometimes it's good to just go for a walk to see things in a different light!
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