Capital One
Revitalizing Capital One Spark
Topics
Customer Research, Application Design, Content Strategy
My Role
Creative Director, Account Lead
Through in-depth research and strategic design, we redefined Spark’s online presence—creating a powerful SMB banking portal and content strategy that speaks directly to small business owners’ unique needs.
Background
Capital One Spark is a suite of banking services tailored to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). However, the brand faced challenges in overcoming the perception that its products were simply repackaged consumer products, which didn’t address the unique needs of small business owners. This perception was further reinforced by Spark's online presence, which lacked a clear voice and structure that spoke directly to SMBs' specific challenges.
Objective
Conduct direct research to identify the key needs and opportunities within the SMB banking landscape. Based on these insights, design concepts for an SMB banking portal, along with a high-level content strategy to effectively communicate with the target audience.
Outcomes
A validated user profile and a comprehensive content strategy that Spark can use to inform and guide its internal decision-making process.
Understanding the Audience
Our Sample
Spoke with 11 small-medium business owners
Interviews
Ran each participant through a discussion of their current tools, practices and experiences with their financial practices.
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We also asked participants to complete a number of exercises, such as card sorting and group labeling in order to determine not only the desired benefits and priority of their ideal banking products.
Reported Priorities
Minimizing costs and providing banking assistance were the clear winners from the research.
Greater Definition of Target Audience
Data from the research also suggested that due to the unique benefits and requirements of Spark's offerings, Capital One could further focus on a segment of the SMB market.
Editorial Strategy
Out of the research 6 princples were created that identified how our target audiences wanted to be spoken to.
Understanding the Audience
From there we translated the strategic theory into different holistic concepts that tested our strategy across many different facets of an online experience. These concepts included:
Site structure
Page Structure
Concept 1: Product Forward
Content structure that kept the Spark products at the center and focused on matching their value prop to identified problems.
Concept 2: Needs Focus
Content structure starts with the most commonly identified SMB need and let the user self-select their journey.
