Online Credit Card Balance Transfers Re-imagined

Defining The Project

My Role:
Lead Product Designer
Content Strategist

The Challenge
The online credit card balance transfer product for one of the largest financial services companies in the country was outdated and it was significantly affecting the product’s bottom line. The user experience design was in dire need of modernization; flaws in the system led to misdirected payments; and the product’s performance was further suffering because it was sitting on a legacy platform.

In 2019, these notable statistics prompted the product redesign:

22% increase in charge-off expenses

17% increase in customer complaints about failed transfers

18% decrease in the accuracy of the applications finding the correct vendors.

One-on-one user interviews and usability testing uncovered major issues with findability. Users consistently had difficulty in both initiating and completing balance transfers.

Our research uncovered several key findings:

1. Users struggled to find where and how to initiate the balance transfer process online. 

2. Users had difficulty accessing offer details.

3. Users wanted a way to view an archive of transfers completed and which ones were “in process”.

4. Users reported a lack of control and an inability to find their existing credit card creditors.

5. Complaints from users who were not aware that their personal information would be used.

Design Phase

Activities Included: Site map, sketching, wireframing, prototyping, user testing

This included creating an environment for a shared understanding between our project managers, business analysts, and stakeholders on the overall rationale, scope, and expected outcome of the project. It was also very important for me to establish a product that met all ADA standards, while enforcing and at times introducing new conversations around our XD Standards. This task was ensured by maintaining constant communication with our product, engineering, and accessibility teams.

• Enhance the balance transfer payee validation process, when determining the correct payee for electronic balance transfer transactions. The electronic balance transfer requests will have the payee information validated and confirmed by the customer, prior to submission, therefore eliminating any bank errors with misdirected electronic payments.

• After consulting with legal I suggested that we create a Consent to Contact Pop Up at the onset of our experience. 
This would alleviate the users of feeling any lack of privacy, while also protecting the business as we used their information to communicate with the user as needed. Previously we had experienced complaints from users who were not aware that we would be using this personal information.

• Also we are currently undergoing a massive overhaul in which we are translating current design previously built in JQuery to REACT.

• As Content Strategist, I translated our design into a copy deck which serves as a ‘book of law’ so to speak for our development team.

FIND MY CREDITOR BUTTON

To alleviate this problem we wanted to pinpoint an appropriate method that would give the user a 100% success rate. After doing market research on our competitors, and deciding which best practices to incorporate we were able to develop a Find My Creditor Button. This gave the user the ability to manually conduct a creditor match, thus leaving no room for system error within the results.

Results

Although our product is still in development, we’ve already realized significant improvements through the usability testing of our prototype.

After implementing key enhancements such as, increasing findability, streamlining the transfer process, and adding the ‘Find my creditor’ function, we’ve found:

User abandonment during balance transfer process greatly decreased

Successful online conversions of balance transfers were significantly increased

Online applications for credit cards increased