Design Process

The team began by focusing on understanding the problem space and needs around new-to-credit individuals, using in-home interviews, observation, and card sort activities. Next, the team created, iterated, and elicited feedback on four concepts related to the market opportunity, “Link smart credit choices to accomplishing goals.” One concept area evaluated during user looks was pairing the credit card with a mobile app to give customers a greater sense of financial transparency - an important insight for building trust with this demographic - and reward good credit behavior. This was the most promising concept selected for refinement and became the credit-building card and app product.

Bringing Kudos to Life

Equipping the client with effective storytelling for executive audiences was essential so that they could then confidently pitch the idea to their leadership and socialize the product concept across the organization consistently. A 4-minute video telling the cohesive story of Kudos, as well as short animations displaying the mobile user experience, was created in under a week.

Personal contributions: As client leader and project guide, a key part of my role was leading the design team through a rigorous storyboarding exercise to synthesize insights from research and link them to expressions of “moments that matter” so that each scene in the story visualized design intent that was rooted in research. I advised the team on choosing a video production approach that would match the fidelity of the concept at that stage: believable, but not too polished as to seem final to executive leaders who were learning of the product idea for the first time.

Design Outcomes

Kudos was part of Fifth Third Bancorp’s 2019 strategic planning, during which programs and initiatives are evaluated for funding. The work moved forward in early 2019 under the new Head of Consumer Payments.

“Seeing the insights come to life and seeing how the team borrowed experience and knowledge from past projects was impressive. All the concepts were very different, but they all worked together. They could stand alone or they could be grouped together. The range was great. It put a lot of work on us in terms of really having to think about how we bring this back to the organization and what makes sense for us. It challenged us to answer some tough questions. We had to do some soul-searching.” FTB Executive Sponsor