Capital One Branch Transformation

• Client: Capital One
• Duration: 2013-2015
• Role: product strategy, business alignment, narrative design and communications, design leadership, UX research, experience design, interaction design, visual design, motion design
• Goal: Envision a new kind of experience for bank customers and associates across multiple channels and touch points.
• Outcome: A modern omni-channel strategy for engaging with the customers in physical locations and beyond, an Apple-recognized ecosystem of products and services, and a huge increase in branch sales and brand recognition.

I was a lead designer on a team serving more than 900 Capital One branches across half the country. It grew into a $4M+ project (first among the big banks) to put iPads in hundreds of retail locations. I led design and build on the whole set of iPad apps, both customer-facing and banker-only, covering the entire branch visit from the moment someone walks in to the moment they sign.

At this scale, every design is service design. You’re working in digital and physical at once, with customers and bankers in the same picture, and you stop thinking about individual products and start thinking about the whole ecosystem, because in a branch nothing stands on its own.

I learned systems thinking early, because both my parents are architects. They taught me that a building isn’t bricks, it’s a set of systems that all have to work together: structure, water, gas, power. They also taught me how people move through a space, the sight lines and the footpaths, and that turned out to be exactly what designing a branch needed.

Architecture takes years, so architects model things before they commit to them. I borrowed the habit. We built branches out of LEGO, mocked up full-size ATMs in foam core, and sketched constantly.

All that work in physical space led to the one idea that mattered most: sit beside the customer instead of across a desk from them. The iPad alone proved it out. Hand a banker a tablet and the desk stops being a barrier between two people. From there we built the rest of the ecosystem together with the bankers, not just for them. And because change like this takes years, I put real effort into the narrative itself, the story that keeps a vision alive in a company long enough to actually land.

We started with the customer-facing apps, which were essentially sales tools. That’s where progressive disclosure clicked: give people exactly enough at exactly the right moment, and nothing more. We also learned, the hard way, that content is design. We dropped the lorem ipsum and worked with real numbers and real words, because placeholder content hides the real problems.

We brought in content strategists to replace the bank-speak with plain language. We even reworked the legal disclaimers, breaking the usual wall of fine print into pieces a person could actually get through.

As the apps proved themselves and trust grew, we moved into the rest of the service blueprint. We built the banker-facing tools too, like the lobby management system, and closed the loop across check-in kiosks, touch panels, banker iPads and watches, and the customer’s own phone.

At this scale, inclusion is simply good business. Even the smaller segments add up to billions in potential revenue, so leaving them out means leaving money on the table. We built in accessibility and VoiceOver for customers with disabilities, translated the content into several languages, and let people choose a banker who speaks theirs.

This took years and a lot of good people to pull off. The branch iPads even made it into Apple’s own business success stories. The video’s just below.

The work became the foundation for how Capital One thought about branch banking, and it’s still running today.