Bank of America offers over 5,000 cards to the consumer market, most of which are affinity cards for people who want to support or promote an interest group.  The digital sales and marketing experience offers details on the most popular cards, and provide tools so shoppers can compare and apply for a card. 

As the market rebounded for the 2009 Credit Card act, Bank of America planned to invest in creating a new sales and marketing experience.  We were moving to a new content management system, and planned to provide more dynamic content.

ROLE: Product Designer Team Leader – Digital Product Strategy, User Research, Interaction, Visual design, Prototyping & Testing, Information Architecture, Content Creation

To understand the problem, the team collect voice of the customer data, discussed marketable card features with product owners, analyzed available quantitative data, conducted quantitative studies of the credit card buyers journey, and created a competitive analysis.  After compiling the research, we aligned on a few key areas of improvement:

Inconsistent card information.  Credit Card details pages focused on unique features of the card, which made comparisons difficult.

Paradox of choice. The site offered a variety of cards without a way to narrow/filter.

Text heavy.  As a banking product, there was little emphasis placed on the physical card.

No expert recommendation.  BofA marketed a card, but did not recommend cards for certain segments.

We reviewed our findings to Credit Card leadership, and agreed to reduce online credit cards to the top 100 performing products.  I schedule a few workshops to align on potential solutions and key features:

Make credit card information comparable. We decided to categorize all card details, so every feature could be compared.

Flexible ways to filter.  Provide consumers a variety of options for narrowing selection.

Personalize the product.  Since the consumer would have a physical product in their pocket, we could leverage this in imagery.

We conducted user testing with potential solutions, and took our learnings into the delivery phase.  Over the course of 3 years we iterated on design, test, deliver and learned.  The visuals below show the progression from year to year.

Main page – For the MVP, we decided to lead with a guided selling tool with a simple decision tree. Version 2 added many new features to the site, which were scaled back for version 3.

View all page – For the MVP, we deliver 23 credit cards, and implemented a secondary navigation that acted like a “dumb” filter.  In Version 2 we replaced the secondary navigation with a dynamic filter, and simply added more cards to the page for version 3.

Compare page – For version 2 we created a comparison page, which was prepopulated with the popular cards on the main page.  In Version 3, we integrated on all pages, and anchored a “Cards to compare” drawer to the bottom of the browser window.

Detail page – For version 1, we created a content strategy and flexible template to support any credit card offer, and emphasized the card as a physical product.