Case study: Credit card website redesign
By: Jeffrey Johnson
Tags: Redesign, Dashboard, UX Design, UX, Product Design

I am an obsessive credit card points nerd. That being said, I often proselytize my friends with information on how much I make on credit cards and rewards and how it doesn’t make sense. Because it doesn’t. It’s a moment that is not going to last (explainer video below), and I’m enjoying it very much.

Points Points Points

I am a cult fanatic of earning and using credit card points and words can not describe the satisfaction of buying a 970$ plane ticket to Sydney and making it go away with the push of a button.

That said, my experience became a bit of a “wamp-womp” when I recently visited my Capitol One Venture Cards desktop experience.

First. Look at the mobile app. I’ve been using this card for a year now. I love the card and the app is great. Sleek. Straightforward. I’ve never had to think about your UI. Job well done Capitol l.

Take a look at the website though.

Hmmm…

Come on Capital One I thought you guys were professionals! Would one of the consistently top 3 rated points card from the 12th largest bank in America have this kind of desktop?

The answer is clearly yes. yes it would.

But not for long, it’s time for a makeover!

My chief complaints.

A lack of cohesion. Rule number one. Mind the consistency. If I went into a grocery store to buy milk in the back and I just found a note that said “The milk and eggs are in the front. Sorry about you walking all the way back here. You can still find milk and eggs in the back of all our other locations.” All though impressed with the care they took to write hand write the note, I would not want to shop there again.

Bad UI Design: See again the site below:

The usage of space just instantly lacks any kind of “fung shui” for me. First of all the two cards on the bottom instantly jump out to me as they don’t seem to know if they want to nest under the blue “card” or both it and its neighboring “transactions” card to the right. In fact, why don’t instead of putting the two cards on the bottom we quickly nest them on the right and put transactions “underneath” the “Venture” card.

That’s nice. It also brings back some of that cohesion we are looking to reestablish from our mobile experience. Yay.

I also changed the picture because the other picture didn’t really look so great with the white background. A rotating dark banner is a better look and branding. Here’s a side by side.

I feel like the contrast and the punchiness of the blue banner wrapping to full span of our monitor really brings balance that’s going to look nice across all screen sizes. Including our desktop am I right you guys. :)

Please note. Given the original files I could have done a lot more with the dimensions and it would be neatly packed into one screen / placed side by side. Pardon the dimensions are a sloppy cause I’m working with screen grabs here.

Also, what’s with the profile picture in the banner? I went to my other two credit card companies and neither of them offered a profile picture. This is a bank, it intuitively doesn’t make any sense to me. I’m relying on you to protect my most sensitive information. I’m talking to personnel on the phone who much of it is divulged to, and I’m counting on you to limit it’s collection to the bare minimum necessary to manage my securities.

I can’t speak about this without actually talking to users and perhaps there’s a more complicated multi-person instance where this is going to be valuable (i.e. family or small business), but does that cancel out the risk you may take on when you personalize such a privacy sensitive business experience?

How about instead we use the users name at the top of the screen where it says good morning.

For example, if I’m a mother of 2, Sarah and Demetri, it says “Good morning, Demetri,” so I now know that it’s Demetri who making this purchases below. Cool. Now we can retain the same sense of organization without compromising the privacy.

I honestly don’t know what the intention of the profile icon is without doing more research, but I’m fine with the name. It’s clean, functional and works well with the space and the same principle works on mobile. Your a bank, not taking unnecessary risks sort of seems like your thing. ;)

Finally, Capital One is all ways hitting me up about their 200,000 point bonus. Which is great, because I certainly qualify as a raving fan and proselytize my friends as said before, so why don’t we implement that into our desktop experience. It makes sense with our business goals, so let’s create a card inviting users on that offer and go with three cards on the bottom.

Going to eat some Turkey

Well, that’s just a quick play around all I had time for today after all it is Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving everyone. All I can say about the Capital One desktop is that you may.