XP Card

Role and contribution

My role in this project evolved overtime, as the product and the team also evolved. Initially, I had a third-party research consultancy helping us better understand our target audience and their relation with credit cards, investments and identify gaps, overlaps and opportunities.

Then, as decisions were being made on business strategy, I hired a Service Designer to the team, and together we defined the product strategy and shaped the MVP, which we had to launch on a record time — only 6 months!

Finally, as the MVP gained traction among its early-adopters, we started growing our team up to 6 designers among UX/UI, Service and Research and I took on the Design Lead role, working more closely with the PMs and the GPM on the product's strategy and roadmap while I managed my team's careers and still served as technical leadership, helping them grow as designers.

Defining the product strategy

For the early iterations of the product we narrowed our target audience down to affluent customers — which, for XP, means customers with assets over R$300k. This would give us a better control over our user base since this group represents only a relatively small portion of XP's customer base, also making it easier for us to scale the product up gradually in the future.

The research we've done gave us a pretty good understanding of how our customers deal with money beyond just investments and allowed us to identify gaps, overlaps, pain points and opportunities along their spending and saving journeys.

Also based on the insights from this research we've defined a small set of Product Principles that would guide the product's experience and drive our decisions as we designed it.

Building the MVP

To define the scope of our MVP, we relied on the Product Principles previously established and took a lean approach in regards to what features to include or not to include, without compromising on the design and experience of the final product and with extra care to detail — our Brilliant Basics.

Sign up and onboarding flows

Following our Brilliant Basics approach, we've set ourselves the challenge of designing the best performing sign up flow possible, taking advantage of the fact that our users were already in the XP's customer base.

The user flow was then optimized to ask for as little manual user input as possible, therefore drastically minimizing the error and bounce rates to as low as 3%.

Real usage data from the first quarter post-launch pointed at a completion time average of under 60s for the whole sign up flow. The average for the sign up and onboarding flows combined clocked at under 100s.

The invoice experience

Another step of the journey we really put our Brilliant Basics concept into practice was the invoice.

Our goal was to design an invoice experience as simple and transparent as possible, making it easy for the users to view their spending history, making comparisons with previous invoices, and having a forecast of the next few invoices. We've also added a few small insights about each invoice.

Investback: not your usual cashback

Following our Yield Driven product principle, we introduced a new twist to the cashback alongside our product: the Investback, a kind of cashback that's earned on each transaction and goes straight to an investment fund created exclusively for this purpose. It became an industry benchmark here in Brazil and is eventually making its way into becoming a standard among credit cards targeted to investors.

Even though we wouldn't have the Investback feature ready to be launched with our MVP, we decided to add a little nod to it by showing the total balance in the Hub, which links to a history of every transaction that earned you an Investback. It wasn't much, but was more than enough to spark interest and curiosity towards this very important feature of our product.

Tying it all together: the hub

Within the XP app's information architecture, the credit card is just one of the three main products the company offers. That's why it lives within a tab on the menu bar.

We decided that the best approach for our home page was to mimic the app’s own home page and turn it into a hub, following a progressive disclosure concept in which we display a summary of all the main information regarding the product, which the user could then tap to dig more into.

The current version of the Cards Hub evolved a lot since this first iteration but these concepts still remain untouched.