Digital presentment and payment

As my former Capital One Wallet project sunset, I joined the Vault team at Capital One as a Principal Visual Designer to discover pre-customer opportunities. So, we set our sights to build something that anyone could use. Vault, which was later renamed to Focus, is a single destination for life’s to-dos, allowing consumers to take action in self service digital channels. Viewing bills, managing their financial wellbeing, and making payments on their own time. I took over as the Head of Design for the Focus org in 2019, managing a small team of three designers to build out these next generation document movement platforms for Capital One.

Discovering our personas

We wanted to leverage what we did great as a bank, but rethink our customer's relationships with their bills and document “to-dos”. I was able to join the team setting out on an adventure to discover how Capital One customers, and non-customers, managed the finances of their daily lives. From bringing individuals into our user lab in Virginia and traveled to Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles to spend time in the homes of our potential users. We developed three main personas, but honed in on one, Mike.

Mike is a consultant and travels a lot, he needs to know things are taken care of at home while he’s gone, otherwise he misses things and it costs him more time and more money.

Early prototyping

We started with a series of design sprints to prove out our main hypothesis and work out main flows. I made a handful of prototypes and concepts that were validated in testing and shared with leadership and accountable executives.

The most important component came to life

Out of those sprints came a simple but crucial component—the Heads Up Card. Simply put, Heads Up Cards were meant to show users what to focus on now. If there was nothing to focus on at the time, there would be an empty state. These became core to the Focus experience, ensuring users could focus on what was most important at the given moment.