Role: content designer, brand-new to Capital One
Site: mydata.capitalone.com
Skills: content writing, content editing, legal writing, product design, data design, persona research, user flows, Figma prototyping, Agile development, Jira ticketing
Background and stakes
In 2018, California passed a new law curtailing the retention and sale of personal information. Four years later, the state’s Attorney General fined Sephora $1.2 million for violating that law, the California Consumer Privacy Act.
I joined Capital One in 2019, just months after 100 million records were exposed in a data breach. Regulatory attention–and Capital One’s stance on data privacy and transparency–was stronger than ever.
Task
I hit the ground running, taking over from a previous content design consultant on a project with heavy executive stakeholder input.
Persona research revealed tricky situations. For instance, we verify identity by asking users to upload a photo of their government ID. Our most privacy-sensitive users balked, and I homed in on this as a pain point that needed more explanation.
Action
I rapidly synthesized existing documentation, including legal briefs on the CCPA. Some pages were code-locked for technical reasons, including an unfortunate page with five (!) call-to-action buttons.
Where I could move the needle was in humanizing the language and making iterative changes in future Program Increments. Here are some ways I contributed:
- Reduced the number of clicks in the identity-checking flow
- Wrote helper text explaining to users why we needed a picture of their government ID to verify their identity
- Wrote 20+ phone scripts and emails for customer support specialists who handle simple and complex data request cases
- Co-designed our annual transparency report, a regulatory requirement
Results
Our team far surpassed the regulatory requirements of the CCPA.
The law allows 45 days to fulfill requests, with an optional 45-day extension. Our turnaround time of 2 to 3 days far surpasses that timeline. What’s more, we committed to fulfilling requests for anyone in the United States, not just California residents.
Capital One’s CEO Rich Fairbank recognized this project personally with the company’s top honor, the Circle of Excellence Award.
Trivia
This experience has my favorite piece of content I’ve ever put in a design, visible in that first image.
It came from a round of Funemployment, an improv acting party game where you apply for different jobs with silly prompts. My friend Andrew had to freestyle rap to earn a data analyst job, and he instantly won with the line “data, data, TA-DA!”
T.S. Eliot said, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” You better believe I took that line, and then paired it with the :tada: emoji. 🎉