capital one small business banking concept models & IA

project goals

Explore concepts about the Small Business owner and their financial needs related to the business and the tools provided by Capital One.

Activities:

Develop multiple approaches to organizing the Small Business Banking tool.
Model the ecosystem to provide a visual mapping of the system and the data within the system.
Explore future looking information architecture concepts.

conceptual models

Working with the Design Director for the Small Business banking group, we brainstormed high-level concepts around how money moves in and out of the ecosystem and what the guiding principles for customers and their businesses might be.

Together we brainstormed metaphors for visualizing these principles—a triptik map to get you where you need—a super eco-drive to get you there faster—time as a forcing function for tasks.

modeling the system

Taking several different perspectives, I modeled the system, creating different visualizations that each emphasized different aspects of the system as well as defined different tasks a business owner needed to be able to do.

Through refining the visualization of the system models we explored how time changes the user tasks as well as fleshing out every entity, data object and action within the system and documenting their relationships to one another.

The final concept model uses TIME as an organizing principle and all the business owner’s tasks are arranged based on when during the year (or the cadence) that those tasks happen. A set of guiding principles align to each section of the circle and are arranged by internal and external motivators.

data model

The final data model explores all the actors in the system, the actions that can be taken on that actor and all the data entities that need to be accounted for in the database.

The entire model is almost 5 feet long by 17 inches and looks at each major section of existing and future services for the small business owner.

conceptual information architecture

Based on the previous modeling work, the user research conducted in-house and by my Tangible UX team as well as the system audits,
I developed 3 different information architecture models for how a redesigned information architecture and application organization might look like.

C1 – SMB – Information Architecture Concepts-v2_Page_5

concept sketches to stress test IA ideas

For each IA concept, I made a series of sketches based on user scenarios. Each sketchy flow was intended to out the IA into practice in the way a customer would interact with it in context.