The Possible Card
Launched June 2022
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.
The people who can't cover an emergency have the least access to credit.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
From Application
Set up payments
Mail the card
To Dashboard
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.