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Pre-Qualification

    • Potential Customers

    • Feel safe to apply for credit without harming their credit score

    • Marketing, Creative,Analytics, and Compliance teams

    • Provide a clear form to engage new customers to apply for a credit line without impacting their credit score

    • Provide research

    • Document questions and requests

    • Create mockups & flow

    • Present to stakeholders & gather feedback

    • Work with developers to test and deploy

    • Comparative Analysis

    • 5 Second Test

    • Surveys

    • Confluence - Documentation/Research

    • Otter.AI - note taking

    • Jira - Dev Collaboration

    • Lyssna - User Testing

    • Overflow.io - User Flows

    • Figma - Wireframes

End-to-End Customer Growth Design

Challenge: Fingerhut offers people different credit products who are seeking to establish or re-build their credit. However, if someone applies for credit and isn’t approved, this could lower their credit score.

Hypothesis: Creating an intuitive experience where people feel safe to apply for credit, more people with feel empowered to apply.

Metric Goal: Boost new customers acquisition by 7%.


“This is projected to be one of the biggest opportunities to move the needle this year”

-Stakeholder

Create & Share

My research began by documenting how other banks presented their pre-qualification experiences.

I took particular note of the language, the information they requested, and the amount of steps of the process.

I shared my research with the across teams in order to have a shared understanding of our competitors in the space.

Comparative analysis gave me insight to the language and tools our competitors use.

Early designs of banners and landing pages

I made early mocks to further discussion and plot out requirements.


Requirements Change

I shared my research across the marketing, creative, and product teams to stayed aligned in our approach.

I worked with the QA and product owner on the team to confirm all possible scenarios and discover any missing edge cases.

In order to understand how people respond to a form asking them to fill out personal information, I ran several rounds of user testing.

During this discovery, requirements were changing daily. I created and updated a user flow so all teams could view and provide feedback for the current state of this initiative.


Testing Testing

What makes people want to interact with a form? What impact does the required fields or style of the form have on people’s willingness to interact?

I ran two rounds of 5 Second Tests with 50 lyssna testers

3 Open-Ended Questions:
-Would you feel comfortable entering personal information into this either of these forms?
-What made you feel comfortable and what did not?
-How do you know a website is secure?

First round of 5 second test

Second round of 5 second test

Key takeaways:
- light/dark mode and form field style split favorability
- a website is felt to be secure when a ‘lock icon’ is displayed

With that insight, I recommended moving the digicert lock badge from the footer to below the CTA to give people a dynamic sense of security.


Stakeholder Review

I gave a walkthrough of the pre-qualification user journey map at the weekly update meeting for stakeholders and ELT. I emphasized that this experience is fast, secure, and reassures people that this will not affect their score. I also detailed the post-launch test iterations.

The response was positive and the feature was set to launch ahead of schedule. I met with the team to write and prioritize stories.

Journey Map shared with stakeholders outlining the Pre-Qualification experience


This initiative will help us reach our target growth for new customers
— Executive Leadership Team member

Impact / Second Phase

The first month after launching saw an 12% increase in new customers acquisition which boosted sales in a historically slow season.

Next I recommended iterations to test, a multi step form that adds a few fields that would increase the chance of the applicate’s approval rate.