Digital Redesign of Luxury Credit Card

BACKGROUND

A Fortune 100 financial services client asked us to evaluate and shape the digital redesign of their premium credit card. The project was high-visibility and required balancing business priorities (increase enrollment in perks) with design goals (create a high-end digital experience) to address competing stakeholder interests. We needed to run research that would highlight how to stay competitive in a market where products have high costs and customers have high standards.

The initial scope was a one-off usability study paired with some generative research, but after the first round demonstrated strong value, it expanded into a 6-month iterative research and design program.

My research partner and I were picked to lead this project for our combined ability to:

1)    run research that would deliver results

2)   develop an in-person learning experience for our clients

3)   produce a research film that our client could use to evangelize research throughout their company.

PROCESS

Methods & Scale

In total, we had 3 rounds of in-person research (~50 customers total), including:

• 24 surveys + interviews + usability sessions + iteration / co-analysis workshops with cross-functional stakeholders (Design, Product, Marketing, Engineering, Copywriting, Business)

• 13 interviews + usability sessions

• 12 interviews + usability sessions

Why these methods at this scale?

• Sample Diversity: need to test with enough participants across user types, devices, product journeys, and locations

• Generative: desire to better understand expectations for luxury digital experiences more broadly

• Evaluative: fast in-the-moment collaboration, iterative design, and validation with designers

• Quick Buy-in: executives in-person see users’ pain first-hand and are more quickly convinced of strategic recommendations

• Research Evangelism: executives across orgs see value of investing more in research like this

Challenges & Limitations

• High-Visibility, High Stakes: More people wanted to get involved as the project progressed; VPs attended sessions; a flop would likely mean loss of a major client and huge loss of client’s customers.

• Managing a Multi-Country Team: With only 1 hour of overlap between SF and London teams, proactive written communication was key.

• Difficult Recruit: Hard-to-find participant cohorts; participants (fairly) don’t want to go out when its snowing; onboarding a new recruit partner.

• Creating a Lab from Scratch: Logistics of finding and building a space in a city none of us lived in; participants and stakeholders all in one space but can’t see each other; it was snowing!

• Quick Timelines within Rounds: Prototypes locked in only a few days in advance of sessions; travel, jet lag, and analysis all in 1 week; strict fintech privacy rules prohibited use of AI tools to aid analysis.

• Complex Testing Setup: Multiple prototypes across devices and operating systems; streaming to in-room and remote observers; testing screen-based and analog experiences.

Scaling Agency-side Analysis Processes

Our agency was changing a lot at the time of this project, and since this project was iterative in nature, three of us decided to use it as an opportunity to build repeatable analysis systems to:

• speed up research across this and future projects.

• prevent starting from scratch with each project or new teammate.

• move messy, real-world data into collaborative online workspaces quickly and effectively.

• ensure outputs were client-ready with minimal turnaround time.

• improve inter-rater reliability and traceability from research objectives → findings → insights → recommendations.

I personally took a lead role in designing and refining our note-taking and analysis process.

Why?

• A good note-taking system gets some analysis done in the moment.

• It highlights anything missing while the participant is still there with you.

• The client had strict rules against using AI tools with participant data, preventing use of some analysis methods we had already scaled.

• Analysis was a hard-to-explain, almost intangible process for many on the team. I’d really been feeling the pain of not having a clear process and felt it needed to change in order to teach incoming teammates.

• Client researchers wanted to collaborate with us on analysis, meaning we’d need to polish our outputs and be explicit about what we needed when working with them.

Eventually, we landed on an approach we could turn into a template that multiple members of our agency had validated across rounds.