Overview

In 5 weeks, we were tasked with helping Mastercard develop a 3 year vision of how they could play a more prominent role in a space they already operate in. Due to the nature of the project, I cannot go into any specifics, but can talk about the process.

Role

As the only UX Designer on a team of 3 Design Strategists, I focused on understanding the experience of users today and key pain points that we could solve for. I also worked on market research, stakeholder interviews, user interviews, research synthesis, workshop planning and facilitation, and concept refinement.

Process

We followed a straightforward process for this project. However, because this project had such a compressed timeline, most steps of the process overlapped and we were were juggling multiple forms of research every week for the first half of the project.

Secondary research

We started by gathering and reading secondary research relevant to the topic area. We read articles, social media posts, industry reports, and anything relevant we could find.

Stakeholder interviews

Once we had a basic understanding of the space, we started interviewing key stakeholders from Mastercard. Our goals were to understand how Mastercard played in the space today, where their perceived strengths and weaknesses laid, and to gain a deeper understanding of the inner workings of the industry.

Competitive UX audit

To get a better understanding of what other companies in the space were doing, I did an UX audit of 16 products. I focused on understanding the strength of a product’s UX, to what degree they used automation and AI to improve the experience, how well they used integrations and data to improve the experience, and what stages of the overall user journey each product focused on. This helped understand what was considered “good” vs “great” across products in the market today.

UserZoom survey

As a quick way to get broad signals, we developed a survey and gathered results using UserZoom. The data is not statistically significant, but it was good enough to get some broad signals on what users thought about their existing experience using products on the market today. We also gained one very useful insight that we were able to validate later through more research.

User interviews

We conducted 14 interviews with users to get a deeper understanding around some questions we’d developed based on our other research. We developed an one hour interview guide that focused on understanding a user’s experience by building a journey map together. The interviews were our most valuable piece of research and resulted in the most valuable insights.

Synthesis

Based on our primary and secondary research, we started developing key insights that we presented to the clients for input. In the end, we had three main themes that were each made up of three key insights. These became the basis for our workshop.

Workshop

We ran a two day workshop with our clients with the goal of bringing together all of our research and their domain expertise to come up with a handful of concepts. We ran exercises such as creating empathy maps, building journey maps, crafting how might we statements, and concept ideation. At the end of two days we had 12 concepts that everyone was excited about moving forward with.

Refinement

After the workshop we looked at all the concepts to merge and refine as necessary. To wrap up the project, we designed a 45 minute in-person experience to lead the executive sponsor for the project though our work and highlight the top three concepts.

Outcome

Everyone involved with the project was happy with the outcome. The executive sponsor and the client team were excited about where we landed. This project was just a first step in what will be many projects to explore and validate new ideas in the space. To wrap up the project, we worked with the clients to ensure they had the research, insights, and documentation necessary to continue the project.