CASE STUDIES Customer Driven Product Design

Disrupting The Auto Industry

Capital One’s auto finance business is the nation’s largest auto lender. Servicing over 4.5 million customers and partnering with 17,000 dealerships, its success is built on innovative B2C and B2B platforms driven by customer focused experiences.

The Challenge & Solution

Dealers often lack the information and capabilities needed to effectively manage their relationships with lenders. These gaps lead to process breakdowns and missing obligations that introduce friction into the dealer / lender relationships. Dealerships do not have a clear line of sight on areas of their business where people and process fail, the challenges of understanding the unique details of every lending relationship, and managing payments to and from their lending partners.

Capital One provides its dealership partners the technology that empowers them with data and capabilities to effectively manage their financial interactions with Capital One.

Empathy & Definition

UX research included over 70 customer and associate empathy sessions, concept validations, and usability testing. User feedback throughout the design process was paramount so we developed customer feedback into our agile process. This journey map / blueprint combination represents the interactions between the dealership and Capital One during the life of the customer’s loan.

Synthesizing the Data and Prioritizing

With a continuous flow of customer feedback driving the iterative approach to customer self service we engaged with co-creators often. Sharing the feedback and collaborating on themes we discover customer pains and develop “leaps of faith” to test and design.

Team Makeup

Marty’s Role

Daily interaction with senior leadership team providing design strategy, consultative guidance, and project status to senior leadership.

Leading UX team in day-to-day functions, mentoring designers, and hands-on UX design.

Participated in the UX design process from discovery, definition, prototyping & designing, to delivering new products and feature enhancements.

Evangelize customer-first solutioning across LOBs with Design Thinking best practices.

At any given time the team comprised of:

  • 2 Principal UX Design Strategist supporting associate facing applications.

  • 1 Senior UX Designer drive vision and work across product feature enhancements.

  • 2 Jr UX Designers creating intuitive interaction experience supporting multiple initiatives

The Approach

  • Develop a design strategy including research, iterative design approach for MVP, service design, and communications.

  • Develop user journey maps to identify pains and define problem statements.

  • Delegate workflows to PODs to support iterative design strategy.

  • Test often and pivot.

Discovery

The Foundation

Identifying the pain points to solve opens up the ideation process that includes information architecture, interaction design, process design, component library definition and functionality scoping.

Prototyping & Designing the Solution

Title digitized perfection process enables dealers to interact with Capital One in real time.

Self Service Dealer’s Dashboard: Accounts receivable & payable, refunds, and title perfection status.

Dealer statements highlighting refunds the dealer owes back to customers.

The Results

  • Disrupting the auto loan industry by digitizing the auto lien process using UX design and Service design best practices.

  • Digital communications strategy increasing customer adoption of B2B platform >20%.

  • Innovating loan servicing products that transform the lives of over 4.5 million customers.