Business Card Management
Business Card Management (BCM) is the tool that allows Truist business clients to manage their card programs, view statements, generate reports, and manage expenses. It is currently not integrated with the Truist online banking platform, but can be accessed from the Truist platform by clicking a button that uses single-sign on to authenticate the client and take them to the third-party BCM tool.
The Ask
The ask for this project was to bring select features out of the third-party Business Card Management tool and into the Truist experience. This can be done with an API, and the three features that were chosen to be moved out first were the following:
1) Add a cardholder to a card program
2) Adjust individual cardholder spending limit
3) Remove a cardholder from the program
The Process
The process was unique because I was first given this project in the fall of 2022, just after I started in my full-time UX role. We came up with a solution, and then it was put on pause for a year by the product team before it came back to me. It was really fun to see how far I had come as a UX designer in one year, and I was way more proud of the solution the second time around. In my opinion, the reason that the second solution is so much better is because I learned how to ask better questions and learned the importance of understanding the product behind the design as much as possible. I had attempted to do this the first time, but had not taken a step back to see the bigger picture and did not think as much about the scalability of the design long-term. I am very proud of how much I have grown as a designer throughout the lifetime of this project.
1) Understand
In order to understand the product and associated gaps behind this design, my design partners and I met repeatedly with a partner on the Small Business Cards Line of Business team. This partner took us through the third party tool in detail and helped us understand the use cases. My work with the multi-user experience project also greatly helped with my understanding of this project, since it helped me see the bigger picture and larger gaps in the Truist Small Business experience.
Once we understood the background and use cases, we had to figure out where in the app the new features would live, since they were completely new to the Truist experience and therefore did not have a place. We built out concepts to visualize how the experience would look integrated with the existing Card Controls experience versus being a new part of the platform. Additionally, I did a competitive analysis where I looked at competitor experiences to see where they put similar features. This helped me quickly rule out integrating these features into the Business Admin experience, which had been considered. Our conclusion after all of this research was that Card Controls was the best place for these new features, so we got to work with designs.
2) Design
We began designing ideas for how the BCM features would be integrated into Card Controls, an existing part of the online experience that allows business users to lock/unlock their cards and report them lost, stolen, or damaged. As we iterated on our designs, we met with our product partners and our line of business partners to discuss. Below are the designs we were considering at this point in the process.
We seemed to run into little problems with every variation of the design, and when we met with a developer partner, he pointed out some bigger issues and suggested that we explore making a new section dedicated to all tasks that have to do with managing a business card program. We took his suggestion and went back to the drawing board, where we realized that managing a business program goes beyond Card Controls, especially as more features make their way out of BCM and into the Truist experience. We decided that we should create a separate section for the Business Card Management features in the Truist experience, but that this section could be accessed from Card Controls since there is a relation and the current access point to the third-party tool lives there. We decided to add more entry points to the internal Business Card Management experience since it is important that these features are discoverable, especially in a time-sensitive situation where a client needs to quickly remove a cardholder. I mapped out the experience for how I thought the internal Business Card Management experience should be and then designed a solution. For confidentiality reasons I am unable to show those screens, but the solution that I came up with was approved by business partners and will be going into production. Once in production, I can upload the screens to my portfolio.
Challenges and Takeaways
A main takeaway from this project is the importance of listening to those around you and talking about your ideas so that you get different perspectives. This project also highlighted the importance of not being afraid to admit when you are wrong and need to take a step back. Had my design partners and I had too much pride in our idea and been unable to listen to the developer who questioned our original idea, we would be delivering a worse experience to our clients. All of us had the same goal, so the most important thing was that the best solution was delivered.