The Possible Card
Launched June 2022
Possible is a mission driven Series-C startup based in Seattle. They're on a mission to make finance fair for underserved communities in the U.S. When I started, the core product was a payday loan alternative for customers with poor credit or no credit at all.
In the U.S. the people who can't cover an emergency have the least access to credit. For many, the only option is a payday loan but that means high fees and huge interest charges. Most payday loans also don't report positive payments to the three credit bureaus.
We built and launched a credit card with no late fees, no interest, no credit check and no security deposit. Anyone could access money between paychecks and pay it back in 4 installments.
This was a true startup experience, I did a little of everything. I was part of a 3 person design team and the only designer several months.
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.
Can't cover a $400 emergency
Have subprime credit cards
Were denied credit due to their score
Are paid in interest and late fees every year
Build credit with repayments
No waiting for funds to be deposited
Pay off important purchases over time
No interest for a monthly fee
Possible's first successful product was a payday loan alternative. Customers could borrow up to $500 to get to the next pay day and they could pay that back over the next 4 paychecks with no interest and no late fees.
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.
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.
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
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 a great onboarding resources as new engineers, designers and leaders joined the company.
Launching the card meant we needed to update our navigation structure to include 2 products and soon 3 - we were working on the early stages of a cash advance product.
While we were building the card we approached the New Company to help us with a rebrand. The original Possible brand was defined in 2019 and updated throughout 2020.
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.
Application
Approval flow
Dashboard
Payements
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.
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.
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.
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.