Discover Integration Experience.

Instead of segmenting by product or demographics, we framed every incoming customer through one behavioral lens: they're spenders. That's the relationship they already understood, and the one we had to build from. The lens was earned, not assumed — we triangulated behavioral transaction data (how Discover customers actually used their cards) with customer research before we built on it.

It sounds small, but the framing did real work. It gave a cross-functional team one shared mental model of who we were designing for, and it set the job-to-be-done: meet people where they are — spending — and create a clear, low-friction path toward the rest of what a bank can do for them.

The first thing a Discover customer sees is the First Time Experience: a welcome animation, followed by a single screen that lays out everything changing for them — at a glance. It orients before it asks for anything: you're in the right place, here's what just happened, here's what's yours.

The animation does the emotional work — it marks the moment as a welcome, not a disruption — and the glance screen does the cognitive work, answering “what changed?” in one place so the question never has to become a phone call. Get this layer wrong and everything downstream inherits the confusion.

The second layer (L2) is where intent turns into action: a checklist of the things that actually make Capital One someone's primary bank — setting up direct deposit, moving autopay and recurring payments, and activating the new card. Each completed step is both a setup task and a small proof that the switch was worth making.

These aren't arbitrary tasks. Direct deposit and recurring payments are the stickiest behaviors a bank can earn, so sequencing the checklist around them meant the steps that took the most effort also carried the most retention payoff.

Across both layers, the core design move was wayfinding — a consistent system of icons and supporting text that orients a switching customer and, above all, signals where action is needed. It answers the running question — “what's going on, and what do I do next?” — right at the point where someone would otherwise hesitate.

This is native mobile work, so the system had to hold up across real iOS and Android patterns — and it was as much a call-deflection strategy as a clarity one: every avoidable “what happened to my account?” is a call to a front-line associate, so a screen that explains itself is a screen that doesn't generate a support call.

The biggest constraint wasn't the brief, it was the canvas. This lives inside the full Capital One app, which doesn't allow for many custom components — so the wayfinding system had to be built almost entirely from the existing toolkit, restructured and recomposed to do a new job. The creativity was in working within the system, not around it.

Layered on top: compliance requirements shaped the language, a hard brand-migration cutover meant narrow windows, and there's no second chance — you can't re-onboard someone, so the first impression had to land the first time.

The work that mattered most wasn't pixels — it was making the case to senior leadership that this layer of clarity deserved to be prioritized, and translating “help people understand what changed” into the terms leadership measures: retained volume, and fewer calls to front-line associates.