Capital One Airport Lounges
Problem
Capital One desired to elevate their brand perception to rival other premium travel cards like the Chase Sapphire Card and the Amex Black Card. The goal was to launch the Venture X Card with extremely competitive benefits. With this need in mind we invested in the airport lounge space.
The main priority was to design a high quality digital experience that made our customers feel like they’re a part of something exclusive. We needed a way to educate our customers about their new lounge benefit and gives them a sleek way to access their digital lounge pass. Before jumping into designing we needed to first define what made a product feel premium since this was a new space for Capital One.
The main priority was to design a high quality digital experience that made our customers feel like they’re a part of something exclusive. We needed a way to educate our customers about their new lounge benefit and gives them a sleek way to access their digital lounge pass. Before jumping into designing we needed to first define what made a product feel premium since this was a new space for Capital One.
My roleI was a UX/UI designer working with a design strategist lead. Within a year I delivered a new experience within our mobile banking app. I did a competitive analysis of our market leaders to define what makes a digital experience feel premium. I conducted moderated and unmoderated tests, using Usertesting.com, to identify our target audience needs and test my designs. The final designs that are live today went though 8 cycles of testing and refining to ensure the best user experience for our customers and achieve the goals set by my stakeholders.
I worked with 1 product owner, 1 project manager, and 16 engineers to align on a roadmap based on the data collected from our research and my MVP designs. I designed a catalog page to display all of our airport lounges, a lounge details page to view information about an individual lounge, and a digital pass for easy lounge access. |
Skills
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Solution
I needed to get a high level understanding of airport travel and the average airport lounge customer. Since we lacked a dedicated UX research team we outsourced an industry insights report to Mckinsey & Company. Once I had a general understanding our target audience I used that data to conduct 6 moderated tests. I narrowed the audience even further to only include individuals who are cardholders with our competitors. This helped me understand how our target currently perceives their lounge benefit and what they desired to see improve.
Then I created a competitive analysis to gain insights into what the current industry standard is for premium digital experiences. I analyzed our competitors in the airport lounge space and applications made for ticket sales. This would help inform my approach to designing the lounge catalog, details page, and digital pass.
Both of these streams of research gave me a strong foundation to kick off the initial design phase. I now understood our customers needs and what the bar is for a premium digital experience.
I used our design system for our mobile application as a guide and designed a wireframe flow of the catalog, details page, and our digital pass. My initial designs also included a checkout flow that allowed customers to purchase additional passes that was later scrapped due to tech and time constraints. After running the low fidelity designs by my product and tech partners and incorporating their feedback I created a high fidelity prototype. I used that prototype to set up 6 unmoderated test to collect feedback from our target audience.
Our first round of testing shed light on usability issues with retrieving the pass and confusion regarding certain sections of our copy. After making improvements to the designs based on the new insights gathered I organized another 6 tests. I repeated this cycle 8 more times, each test raging in complexity and density, but all serving a purpose to improve the customers experience and achieve a premium feel.
Our roadmap stretched over 11 months and it included designing, testing, and developing. In 2021 we successfully launched Capital One’s first digital lounge experience in our mobile banking application. We hit our goal to elevate our brand and support our new travel card launch. My designs set the foundation for how we display lounges at Capital One moving forward since we have plans to expand our lounge portfolio globally.
Then I created a competitive analysis to gain insights into what the current industry standard is for premium digital experiences. I analyzed our competitors in the airport lounge space and applications made for ticket sales. This would help inform my approach to designing the lounge catalog, details page, and digital pass.
Both of these streams of research gave me a strong foundation to kick off the initial design phase. I now understood our customers needs and what the bar is for a premium digital experience.
I used our design system for our mobile application as a guide and designed a wireframe flow of the catalog, details page, and our digital pass. My initial designs also included a checkout flow that allowed customers to purchase additional passes that was later scrapped due to tech and time constraints. After running the low fidelity designs by my product and tech partners and incorporating their feedback I created a high fidelity prototype. I used that prototype to set up 6 unmoderated test to collect feedback from our target audience.
Our first round of testing shed light on usability issues with retrieving the pass and confusion regarding certain sections of our copy. After making improvements to the designs based on the new insights gathered I organized another 6 tests. I repeated this cycle 8 more times, each test raging in complexity and density, but all serving a purpose to improve the customers experience and achieve a premium feel.
Our roadmap stretched over 11 months and it included designing, testing, and developing. In 2021 we successfully launched Capital One’s first digital lounge experience in our mobile banking application. We hit our goal to elevate our brand and support our new travel card launch. My designs set the foundation for how we display lounges at Capital One moving forward since we have plans to expand our lounge portfolio globally.
Impact
Since launching our MVP in 2021 our digital lounge experience has gotten over 7 million visits, averaging to 20,000 daily visits across our iOS and Android applications.
Our lounge experience received a net promoter score of 95% meeting our business goal to elevate our brand and become a real competitor in the premium travel card space.
Points guy: "Amex and chase should be worried about the competition"
thepointsguy.com/guide/capital-one-lounge/
One mile at a time travel site: “This might be the most thoughtfully designed lounge experience that I have ever been in, I can’t wait to see the lounge portfolio expand”
onemileatatime.com/reviews/capital-one-lounge-dfw/
Our lounge experience received a net promoter score of 95% meeting our business goal to elevate our brand and become a real competitor in the premium travel card space.
Points guy: "Amex and chase should be worried about the competition"
thepointsguy.com/guide/capital-one-lounge/
One mile at a time travel site: “This might be the most thoughtfully designed lounge experience that I have ever been in, I can’t wait to see the lounge portfolio expand”
onemileatatime.com/reviews/capital-one-lounge-dfw/
User research
I conducted several rounds of interviews to identify traits of our target audience. Having a quantitative way to identify our customer made it easy to set up filters for unmoderated user tests when it came time to testing my designs.
Target demographic
Usertesting.com
I used Usertesting.com to conduct unmoderated tests. Every time I came up with a new design I would test them with an average of 7 targeted users. Then I would synthesize the insights gathered from the tests and socialize a deck that highlights key takeaways and next steps to inform our stakeholders.
To ensure all the information in the Lounge Details page is accessible I asked users to complete specific tasks such as finding the lounge hours, locating the covid policy, and determining how many guest they can bring.
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To make sure the Digital Pass was easy to find and use I asked users what they needed to access the lounge, how comfortable they felt with Apple Wallet and Google Pay, and how many complimentary guest passes they receive.
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Competitive analysis
I conducted a competitive analysis of our industry leaders to set the bar for a premium digital experience. I pulled key insights from each competitor's digital experience and highlighted flows that I could potentially incorporate into my designs. The applications ranged from lounge space providers like Chase to leaders in the travel industry like Airbnb.
The full list was Google, Trivago, Airbnb, Trip Advisor, Chase, American Express, Stub Hub, Ticket Master, and Lounge Buddy.
The full list was Google, Trivago, Airbnb, Trip Advisor, Chase, American Express, Stub Hub, Ticket Master, and Lounge Buddy.
Once I identified the key insights I organized them according to what our needs were for this new endeavor. Splitting the data into two streams. The first helped me design a catalog page that displays all of the lounges our customer has access to. The second helped me design a details page that informs our customers about everything they need to know before entering one of our Lounges.
Concepts
My initial interaction design was pushing the limits of what was typically expected of a bottom sheet at Capital One. The catalog was housed in a bottom sheet and when a Lounge was selected the bottom sheet lowered a third of the way to reveal a carousel of images. This was inspired by the Airbnb digital experience.
Fail & fail fastSince this was an extreme departure from the normal use cases for bottom sheets our team had concerns about the approach. Mainly because the solution required hard coding this interaction because it wasn’t available out of the box in our design system.
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Digital pass explorationHere are some of the concepts I made and tested for the Digital Pass. Overall they did not align with Capital One's brand and the QR code losses scannability when drastically altered.
Additionally when these designs were tested users asked for the access details to be closer to the QR code itself so it's easy to understand what the QR code does. |
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🔥 Demo of the experience today 🥳Here is a screen recording of the experience in the application today. The perspective is of a Venture Cardholder. We successfully launched in November of 2021. This was my first major customer facing product.
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Platform supportOur mobile banking application is available on the iPhone, iPad, and Android devices. Each demanded unique treatment to execute the correct designs and interactions based on the platform and orientation. I made sure to highlight every difference in my documentation for easy developer handoff.
An unforeseen challenge was that our design systems iOS token names and Android token names were structured differently. Our iOS Figma and Storybook tokens were in alignment but Androids tokens were not. Leading me to I organize more frequent check ins with our Android developers to ensure alignment and clarity. |
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iOS
Here is the Catalog, Details, and Pass pages for our iOS experience in our mobile banking application. Developer hand off went very smoothly and the initial QA phase was a 1:1 match!
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iPadOur application is available for iPad so I followed Apples Human Interface Guidelines.
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AndroidOur mobile banking application is available for Android devices. To offer the best experience I aligned the designs to follow standard Android interactions that their users are familiar with. I designed for a wide variety of screen sizes and handed off images to developers in .webp format ranging from .5x - 3x.
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