Joel Wisneski | Portfolio
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The Possible Card

Launched June 2022

The approval screen for the Possible Card, pictured on an iPhoneThe new Possible Credit Card dashboard
The vision for an accessible Possible Card

The business

A mission Driven Series-C fintech in Seattle

My journey at Possible started in April of 2021 and by August I was leading the company’s next flagship product. We launched a pilot during the summer of 2022, and we started scaling up to bring the card to our entire 350,000 customer waitlist.

Possible Finance is a Series-C fintech startup They’re on a mission to make finance fair for underserved communities. Possible’s core product, when I started, was a payday loan alternative. Customers with bad credit or no credit could access money between paychecks. Then we released a credit card. This was the next step for a lot of people, a revolving account to build credit and a chance to open new opportunities.

Possible Finance Incorporated logo

The problem

67%
Can't cover a $400 emergency
74%
Have been denied credit due to their score
35%
Have subprime credit cards
$120 billion
Are paid in interest and late fees every year

The people who can't cover an emergency have the least access to credit.

Benefits of a credit card

Improving on the loan product

The Possible Card has a few advantages over a Loan. First, you don’t to fill out a form, wait for approval and then transfer the money to a bank account. You can always carry a card with you or add your card to a digital wallet.

Second, the rules we created meant a card with 0% interest and $0 late fees. Just a monthly fee. It’s not the best deal for everyone but it’s a chance to build credit and avoid variable interest. Especially with rapid interest rate hikes.

Credit building
Instant access
Pay Over Time
No interest

The team

A classic squad structure

I wasn’t the first designer on the team. We were organized in a classic pod structure, but I made a point to strengthen the relationship between design and back-end engineering.

The card is an API and data transfer heavy product. That means a lot of back-end calls and a lot of third-party systems. Understanding those opportunities and constraints meant a more well-rounded design.

The starting point

Dozens of screens, no documentation and no requirements

Some content is under NDA

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The first designer on the project was super talented. She had a ton of experience with 0 to 1 products and I was lucky to inherit a good foundation. There was a vision.

At that point, though, we didn’t have a ton of consistency. We were also trying to understand what the requirements were. We made things up on the fly.

Goals for the project

Defining "good enough"

Talking to stakeholders I realized we each had a few goals in mind, but we didn’t define them as a group. Sharing helped. We landed on a 3-step process for the card.

First, we wanted to release a good product. Not a perfect one. The idea was to get this in the hands of our customers and get feedback.

Second, we needed to secure funding. Payday loans are traditionally very profitable but doing them in a customer-centric way is not. Showing the value of the product and the potential market would be the foundation of the new funding round.

Finally, we needed to iterate. Quickly. The first pass was never going to be perfect. We needed to turn our viable product into something valuable.

How we started

Mapping the entire journey

We needed to align on what we were doing and why. For me this meant listening to people talking about the details of a passion project.

We mapped the entire experience and the relationship between the Customer, Possible and external partners.

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The entire customer journey from signup to a credit line increase
The slice of the journey that I worked on. The activation, card usage and card payment experience

This was super useful as an onboarding resource. It also gave the team some much needed definition. We could talk about specific points in the journey and understand the context around that moment.

Updating design patterns

Refining the UI and the navigation

The original Possible brand was defined in 2019 and updated throughout 2020. In 2021 we approached The New Company to help us with a rebrand.

The old brand
The previous Possible Loan Dashboard
The new brand
The new Possible Card dashboard

Working on the card meant extending our design system. Loans don’t have transactions, a physical card, or a revolving balance. We also needed a new navigation system to handle two products.

The rebrand added more complexity. That meant a lot of organization and tracking multiple different versions at once.

Some navigation models we considered, including Hub and Spoke and a Hierarchy model

Understanding the customers

Getting to the MVP and getting feedback

This is the part of the project I wish we had more time for. I came on to the project after a few months in development and we really needed to pick up the pace. We did get a chance to do some foundational work, for one we did competitive analysis.

Understanding what our competitors think a card experience should be was helpful but understanding our own customers was key. A few pre-release surveys gave us an idea, but we didn’t have the time to really dig in.

Subject matter expert interviews helped a lot as well. These gave us more specifics around what we needed to include for compliance and technical requirements.

We put a lot of effort into our pilot process. That meant getting actual data from actual customers and post-release surveys to better understand how customers feel about the assumptions we made.

The approval screen for the Possible Card

The pilot test process

Getting real customer feedback

Once we were ready to release an MVP, we found 100 customers. It was easy. We had about 50,000 customers on the waitlist by this point. This gave us a safe space to test some assumptions but, primarily, this was a technical systems test.

Our 100 customers got free lifetime access to the credit card in exchange for filling out weekly surveys about their experience during the pilot. These surveys focused on comprehension and satisfaction. They also gave us a baseline for future updates.

The plan was to scale from 100 customers to 3,000 customers, stress test the systems and then home in on the experience. We could treat the first few months as discovery and then rapidly iterate from there.

When we thought it was “good enough”, we could launch to our full waitlist. There were 350,000 customers by September of 2022. Then a final launch to anyone and everyone who thought this could be good option.

Delivering the MVP

A minimum card experience

The experience we launched with was barebones. It also included a lot of assumptions. Customers could apply for the card. Of course. They could set up their account, use a central dashboard, see their card information, activate their physical card and, most importantly, pay their credit card bill.

No surprises here. This didn’t include fraud flows and some more advanced settings around notifications, but we did plan to address those as fast follows. The goal here was, again, to get it out quickly and get feedback.

A diagram of the MVP experience

Customer satisfaction scores

Overall good with some gaps

During the pilot customers were given a weekly survey. Our researcher, freshly hired before the pilot, led this initiative. Customers, now members, were asked questions about comprehension and satisfaction. Everything was on a scale of 1 to 5 to make comparisons easier. And we followed up with a more moderated approach when we found interesting insights.

Overall, the results were great. We made generally good assumptions and kept the experience from getting too bloated too quickly. Early problems were easy to identify.

The Possible Card approval page

From Application

A placeholder illustration for setting up the customer's payment method and schedule

Set up payments

A placeholder illustration for mailing the card to our customers

Mail the card

The Possible Card Dashboard

To Dashboard

Where we could improve

The biggest disparity was in the application flow. That’s not great. This is the first impression people have with using the card and it was a confusing mess. Looking back, it’s not difficult to understand why - we were trying to explain rules that we were also trying to uncover. Some of the information was inaccurate, some of it was confusing and some business decisions were just misaligned with the customer’s mental model.

Redefining the application flow became a high priority task. This is where the customer is approved, sets up their payments, agrees to some legal terms and we mail the physical card.

95%
Application
58%
Approval flow
89%
Dashboard
78%
Payments
The initial Possible Card setup flow

Testing the approval flow

A usability test sprint

I ran 35 unmoderated usability tests over the course of 2 weeks. This was quick sprint, getting us to “good enough” as fast as possible. As quick as this turnaround was, it still included partner reviews and collaboration with product and engineering. Everyone agreed to move quickly and stay focused on the specific problems at hand. We just didn’t have time for scope creep.

Prototyping

Working with rules in mind

The usability tests included small and intentional changes. We included a new introduction that celebrated the customer’s approval a bit more. We focused on transparency. We simplified the way we talked about payments. We clarified the overall flow and added the rebranding layer.

Try it out in Figma

Updating the flow

Making a better first impression

We cut down on copy throughout the flow. This time we wanted to focus on one thing at a time and focus on the moment.

The approval screen for the Possible CardThe card activation screen for the Possible CardThe final screen in the application flow

The updates in detail

Clarifying the payment process

Our payment screen got a lot of love. We didn’t require autopay, but we did want to encourage it. We streamlined the copy and showed key dates, meeting customers where they were in the flow.

Results

We did pretty well for a first pass

These were some big updates, and they were done quickly. Customer satisfaction was improved from 58% in the initial flow to 84% in the revised flow. We created a flow with fewer clicks and a lower cognitive load by focusing on the now.

We still had some opportunities and places to improve the experience further, but we made some big improvements with very little time.

58%
Before
84%
After