Intentionality on Display: Capital One Designers at SXSW
Watch ONE Design’s 2017 Presentations
As a Super Sponsor of SXSW, Capital One joined leading innovators, entrepreneurs and industry disruptors in showcasing new products and fostering conversations on the future of finance. In addition to launching the Eno chatbot, an Auto Finance API, and the credit card initiative Project Elements, Capital One’s design team used Antone’s House as a conversation-hub, sharing their latest discoveries and best practices for emerging technology.
A recurring theme bubbled up throughout the presentations: Intent, the power of defining and actively choosing our own motivations, and articulating our purpose. The four talks below honed in on the value of intentionality — whether it’s yours, your industry’s, or your user’s.
The Accessibility panel’s call to action: be intentional about designing with accessibility in mind. Kit Oliynyk’s talk on Design Cultures echoed that challenge: be intentional about partnering strategically for greatest impact.
Both presentations seemed to say, “Don’t add this tool to your toolbox so that when the need arises once a quarter you’ll be prepared. Add this to your toolbox NOW and use it constantly because your impact will be greater, and it will elevate the caliber of everything you do.”
The Money Coaching panel clearly described their service as “an intentional conversation about creating something.” The team equips users to think intentionally about their financial values.
In their talk on Designing Intelligently for AI, two design strategists focused on the user’s needs: In order to design intelligently for AI, don’t get lost in the whiz-bang aspects of new functionality. Remain steadfast, designers! Always (and only) solve for the user’s genuine, ultimate intent.
All four presentations tapped into the sense of forward motion, momentum and drive that powers the Capital One Design team. We don’t build and ship products on accident, for the sake of slick interfaces and street cred. We’re here to relieve financial anxiety. We empower people to use credit wisely. We are changing banking for good — and we’re doing it on purpose.
The Colors of Design Cultures
Kit Oliynyk
Active collaboration requires more than playing nicely with others, and relying on passive soft skills when working in teams is a disservice to everyone’s potential. Kit suggests that awareness of personalities within design is eclipsing the demand for hard skills, which led him to wonder: How might the practice of collaboration shift if we actively seek out specific personalities to partner with? In this inventive deep dive on colors and character, Kit combines the StrengthsFinder assessment with the card-based role playing game Magic: The Gathering to explore strategic partnership.
Accessibility: Why It’s So Important
Mark Penicook, Sarah Goelitz, Kevin Kalahiki, Larry Goldberg, Mike Paciello
Three accessibility experts, a front-end tech lead and a content strategist combine forces in this panel to spread the word: Accessibility is usability. One research participant nailed it, saying, “Accessibility is the difference between existing and living.” It’s more than a pass/fail test, and if it’s an afterthought — if you treat it as a form of risk mitigation, to be reviewed at the end of your design process — your products are weaker by default. This team demonstrates the value of actively designing for extremes: treating people with disabilities like any other user is the right thing to do, the human thing to do, and everyone will benefit from it in the end.
Design as a Service: Coaching at Capital One
Ayla Newhouse, Jessica Striebich, Pamela Jue, Amanda Dewoody
The Money Coaching team at Capital One offers confidence and a sense of normalization to each user, one conversation at a time. The coaching model applies design methods and activities to individual sessions with spenders to remove the taboo of talking about money, and diffuse the angst around financial values. Users don’t even need to be Capital One customers to participate — this service is for anyone with a dollar to their name. In this panel, the team of designers behind this new, first-of-its-kind service discuss the power of metaphor, the similarities between coaching and design, and equipping participants to articulate their own financial belief systems.
Design Intelligently for Artificial Intelligence
Ido Mor, Taurean Butler
Ido and Taurean lure us into the world of Intelligent AI Design, where humanity is just as important a tool as your dataset. Drawing on Sportsball, apartment hunting and empathetic mothers everywhere, these forward thinking design strategists provide a framework for crafting magically human experiences, and challenge their audience in a speedy ideation workshop.
