June - August 2024 (10 weeks)
Product Design Intern on the Research & Design Operations Team
Problem
The Design Process page is hard to navigate
My task for the internship had been to redesign the Design Process webpage on Capital One's internal site. For many reasons the site had not been updated in four years and desperately needed a revamp. The main issues with the site was the repeated page scrolling, overload of content, and redundant page navigation.
The Solution
A redesign that tackles all 3 problems
While I can't show my design for security purposes, I did in the end successfully tackled the three main issues by having the site use tabs within the page that could click through each of the Design Process steps and eliminated a lot of the redundant content to elevate the user experience.
User Interviews
My interviewees all found that going through the site was a tedious process
I developed a comprehensive research study plan and carefully selected 6 interviewees to gain diverse perspectives. My participants included 2 associate design associates, 2 senior design associates, and 2 product managers, ensuring a well-rounded sample to thoroughly test my hypothesis. This range of expertise allowed me to uncover deeper insights into the page’s issues. To structure the study, I organized my questions into three distinct categories, ensuring a focused and effective exploration of each area.
RESEARCH QUESTIONS CATEGORIES:
Personal Design Process - how does the user apply their personal design process to their work?
Knowledge of Capital One's Design Process - does the user know about the C1's design process?
Experience the Capital One Design Process webpage - exploratory testing with guided questions
Main Insight
After synthesizing the interview transcripts in Lucid Spark and identifying a clear pattern that reinforced my original hypothesis, I presented the findings to my team. I then held a brainstorming session to explore various solutions for addressing the identified issues.
Major Insights
Theme 1: Page Navigations
The abundance of dropdown menus for each of the 7 steps in the design process makes it cumbersome for users who only want to focus on one step. They would need to manually expand and collapse multiple menus, turning what should be a simple task into a tedious process. Additionally, once users reach the bottom of the page, there’s no quick way to return to the top, forcing them to scroll through all the expanded dropdown content, which can further hinder the user experience.
Theme 2: Content
While it's understandable to provide content for each step, the information felt outdated and overly redundant, offering more detail than users needed. Additionally, some of the resources within the dropdown menus were outdated, leading users to archived pages or 404 errors when clicked. Many interviewees expressed a preference for fewer details and instead emphasized a desire for more actionable resources and templates that could be applied directly to their team projects. This suggests a shift from excessive content to practical tools would better meet user needs.
Theme 3: Page Scrolling
During the third portion of the interviews, all interviewees remarked on how tedious the page scrolling felt. While some understood the reason for the lengthy scrolling, they unanimously agreed that it needed renovation. The additional dropdown menus for each of the 7 steps in the design process exacerbated the issue, making the scrolling feel excessive. If a user wanted to revisit a previous step, they would be forced to scroll far more than necessary, which detracted from the overall user experience.
Design
Setback + Critiques
Before diving into the design phase, I first met with the software engineer to understand what could be technically achieved on the website. With that clarity, I created my initial designs, one of which incorporated tabs within the page. After presenting these to my team, we collectively agreed that the tabs were the right approach. I iterated on the designs through several rounds of feedback, and once I felt confident in the direction, I conducted a design critique session to identify areas for improvement and necessary adjustments.
