During the summer of 2021, I worked with the Experience Strategy team focused on innovative solutions at Capital One. As a Product Design Intern, my two major projects were designing the new internal associate's platform and envisioning a Capital One workspace deliberately for community investment.
2
moderated tests
4
note taken tests
15
synthesized tests
In July, Capitol One began transitioning the employee's internal platform from an outdated software to LumApps. I was tasked, alongside two other designers, to lead the charge in transitioning Capital One's XD pages. Since I joined this project 5 weeks in and the deadline was well passed my end date, my major goal was to hand off designs and research that would be shipped/utilized in the future.
In partnership with a design manager, I was tasked with learning the software, educating others and designing page templates for XD at Capital One. There were 5 page templates needed, of which I was delegated a large chunk of my responsibility over designing the blog template. The entire process was in collaboration with the design guidelines team, content designers and LumApp's consultants.
To start this project, I benchmarked industry blog leaders and then the current employee blog. Through benchmarking, I identified the major components structuring blogs. Utilizing the major components, I created a structure breakdown of the respective blogs. From speaking with current employees and synthesizing my research, I developed a few major takeaways while acknowledging my constraints. I then pitched my research to my team to get the go ahead to begin designing.
Pairing my findings from my research and the employee/user needs, I proceeded by creating wires of the new internal blog page. Once the information hierarchy was in place, I then began to build out the blog within the new software, LumApps. I designed the blog style format with the purpose to be easily templated. To note, we faced many constraints over the entirety of the project. Such constraints were limitations off the software, restrictions of permissions, no LumApp experts and more.
The goal of this project was to take a human-centered approach in creating a Capital One workspace that would benefit the community by offering local job access opportunities. My team was composed of 14 associates from the Experience Strategy and the Community Impact teams to leverage diverse perspectives from each. When I joined the team, they were 9 months into the venture with a projected completion goal for early 2023.
As a part of the multidisciplinary team, my wide-range role required me to wear a few hats. They consisted of me leading select team meetings, strategizing presentations for executives, creating and moderating various usability tests, synthesizing test results and more. Many of these were done in collaboration with designers, engineers, business analysts, product managers and external affair associates.
Banking For Good:
Without a doubt, my favorite part about my entire summer was working on a project directed to serve the community. I constantly found myself learning the challenges of being a bank and trying to impact the lives of locals for the good. Often we had to step back and ask while our intentions are are great, are we making negative outcomes?
Multiple Stakeholders:
Since my community investment team was preparing to pitch for the next round of funding, we dealt with balancing the scales of what does our research say and what do our investors want to see. As an advocate for the users, I learned how to strategically marry the user needs with the investors wants.
Permissions and Access:
As I have never worked for a bank before and I was an intern, I was surprised to find myself often having to gain access and permissions to many core pieces of my projects. To adjust, I became more proactive when beginning projects in expectation that there would be bumps in the road.
Responsibility:
One of my favorite parts at Capital One was my responsibility as a designer, not an intern. All my work held impactful business results that I was responsible for delivering to my team. Due to this, I found myself highly valuing my work and wanting to deliver for the success of my team and the business.
© 2022 by Matt Allison
Send me an email if you want to learn more @ matthewallison07@gmail.com
