Project
Home Equity Website
Client
Capital One
Overview
While I was at Capital One, I spent about 18 months working on the Home Equity team. Home equity loans allow homeowners to take out a low interest loan using their home as collateral. Many of these borrowers use the money to renovate their homes, but they are commonly used for things like consolidating high interest loans or large purchases. As one of three designers, I split my time between two products: website and loan application.
My role & process
I was the primary designer on the Home Equity Web team and we were all about experimentation and learning. We made continuous improvements to the website by tracking usage metrics and conducting user research. Here are some of the things I worked on:
I worked closely with our product manager to run regular AB tests to optimize search rankings and conversion.
I facilitated card sorts, user interviews, and remote testing to inform our work.
We used a range of qualitative and quantitative methods when conducting research, but one stands out as particularly successful and useful for our team: the Task Performance Indicator (TPI). TPI is a number that we started measuring to evaluate how well users could complete essential tasks on our website. Every 6 months, we recruited 10-15 remote testers to complete these same core tasks. We would then score each task based on their ability to complete it. The final TPI served as an important benchmark for how user friendly our website was.
I found this method invaluable because it was standardized and repeatable. It communicated the impact of our work over time to stakeholders. The core tasks were selected as a team, which helped us stay user-focused and aligned when prioritizing work.
Soon after I started this role, the design team shifted from a centralized to embedded structure. The product teams were excited to have designers available to them full-time but it was tricky at first to manage all the requests from multiple stakeholders. We figured out how to adapt the agile framework (that the dev teams already used) to product design after a few months.
This involved product managers and stakeholders from different teams to attend an intake/planning meeting each sprint with the design team - this encouraged PMs to plan a little further ahead and bring better defined requirements to the table. Additionally the legal team would attend each sprint planning and sprint review meeting to ensure everything was compliant before reaching development.
