How companies can turn design into a competitive advantage

Capital One is taking a human-centered approach to design to create impactful customer experiences that generate value.

As cutting-edge technology has taken the world by storm, people’s expectations for highly sophisticated and personalized brand experiences have skyrocketed. A premium digital product offering or solution that would have been exceptional just a few years ago is the new baseline—and organizations need to think far beyond this baseline to effectively meet consumers’ needs.

“Customer expectations nowadays are incredibly high,” says Daniela Jorge, chief design officer at Capital One. “This means companies can’t afford to get customer experiences wrong. On the flip side, being able to deliver world-class experiences can be a real differentiator in helping businesses compete for people’s attention and loyalty.” 

Organizations can create these exceptional, impactful customer experiences and gain a competitive advantage in a crowded market through human-centered design. Putting people at the center of every phase of development creates products and services that thoughtfully and strategically address customers’ needs.

According to Jorge, there are three key tenets behind effective human-centered design: having a deep understanding of customers, including their needs and pain points based both on what is articulated and what is gleaned from observation methods, cross-functional teams that fall in love with the problem and apply divergent thinking to consider and test a number of concepts to approach it, and iterative processes to experiment with and converge on the best possible solutions for the issue.

Together, these principles can pave the way for customers to encounter exceptional experiences that meet their deepest needs and win their satisfaction and loyalty—and drive results for the organization.

“It’s important that, regardless of their industries or disciplines, business leaders don’t have to make a trade-off between being customer-centric and driving business value,” says Jorge. “Being customer-centric is what leads to business value.”

Meeting consumers where they are

The key to deeply understanding customers is investigating their needs by listening to what they say and observing them in action, explains Jorge.

“Design teams should not only talk to customers about their needs and pain points, but also watch customers and glean insights into the tools they are already using to get a job done,” she says. “Companies can ask users to track their processes of completing a task, such as booking travel, in a journal. This helps businesses better understand how they can design a product to make life easier for the consumer.”

For example, when Capital One was in the process of developing its smarter travel booking experience, Capital One Travel, the company’s designers talked to customers to better understand the pain points they often face throughout the travel journey. These insights led Capital One to include features on Capital One Travel that offer predictive pricing models, unrivaled flexibility, and tools to ensure customers get the best price on thousands of trip options.

Prioritizing inclusivity and iteration

Another essential human-centered design principle is keeping diversity and inclusion at the core of the design process. Jorge explains that leaders must consider diversity and inclusion from both an internal operations and customer perspective. 

“It is critical to have diverse, cross-functional teams working to solve customer’s problems,” she says. “You always end up with better solutions and better ideas when you have varied viewpoints. And it is companies’ responsibility to consider all segments of their customer bases to ensure they are not excluding a portion of their audiences from being able to use their solutions.”

Beyond recognizing the importance of consumer understanding and diversity & inclusion in building a human-centered design framework, business leaders should keep in mind that creating impactful customer experiences is an ongoing pursuit. 

“Once you converge on the best solution in designing a new product, you must keep iterating it and testing it with customers, even after it launches,” says Jorge. “You need to keep rechecking and asking whether the product is continuing to keep up with evolving needs and expectations and if it’s still better than other alternatives.”

Capital One’s multipronged approach to human-centered design has helped pave the way for a number of unique product offerings built to make customers’ lives easier. For example, the company’s cardless ATM feature allows people to use an app to create a QR code that streamlines ATM transactions, eliminating pain points by making daily financial interactions more straightforward. Capital One also introduced an option for customers to make cash deposits in certain stores, which makes banking more accessible and convenient for people in rural areas, those who get paid in cash tips, and employees who work during shifts that conflict with typical banking hours.

“Capital One is really different in the ways in which we think about our customers and solving for their needs first,” says Celia Edwards Karam, president, Retail Bank, at Capital One. “We look for innovative ways to leverage the power of leading design, technology, and product management capabilities to really be able to help people live their best financial lives.”

Looking to the future, Jorge says that while technology will continue to transform the design landscape and what customers expect from companies, leaders should not lose sight of keeping humans at the center of all their products and solutions. And this people-centric mindset will continue to guide how Capital One approaches its business in the years to come.

“We will keep applying a lens of curiosity and empathy to understanding evolving customer needs and expectations,” says Jorge. “Our goal is to always be thinking about how we can design solutions that improve people’s lives.”