Digital Redesign of Premium 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 (encourage exploration) 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

Research Methods

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 premium 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 project

• Managing a multi-country team

• Jetlag

• Creating a research lab from scratch in a city none of us lived in, while it was snowing

• Recruiting hard-to-find participants

• Quick timelines within rounds

• Complex testing setup

• Data privacy rules limiting use of AI analysis tools

How did I meet these challenges? By being proactive.

• Risk Management: Considered trade-offs of different approaches & always developed backup plans.

• Leadership & Collaboration: Developed collaboration strategies, delegated responsibilities, & consulted topic experts.

• Stakeholder Management: Set expectations, clarified scope, provided useful updates, & thoughtfully pushed back when appropriate.

• Creative Problem-Solving: Generated new ideas and pivoted quickly to address unanticipated challenges with minimal resources.

Scaling 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.

IMPACT

• 2x Increase in Enrollment: Research-backed priorities drove higher sign-up rates post-redesign.

• Executive Influence & Strategic Confidence: Shifted leadership away from rigid onboarding toward more user-friendly flow, balancing business goals with customer needs.

• Cross-Functional Buy-in: In-person workshops and a research film created empathy, broke down silos, and secured alignment across Product, Business, Marketing, and Engineering.

• Actionable Outputs: Delivered strategic frameworks and usability recommendations after each round, giving Design, Engineering, Marketing, and Copywriting teams specific next steps.

• Reduced Risk: Enabled Design and Engineering teams to move forward with validated flows and clear usability fixes.

• Marketing Alignment: Provided guidance on messaging and content strategy to better highlight card benefits for target customers.

• Future Research Investment: Evangelized research within client org, leading to increased visibility and further investment in research.