Yingli, a principal associate designer at Capital One, wants to know how people think. This innate curiosity materialized long before she pursued UX design and joined the leading financial services company.
“I explored a variety of applications—including biology, neuroscience, psychology, and robotics—before I started to feel most drawn to human-computer interaction and product design,” she says.
Guided by this desire for knowledge, Yingli refined her psychological and user experience research skills and cultivated expertise in digital design and strategy. When she first began working in design, she wasn’t quite sure it was the right path for her. Soon, she realized that her strong research background was a stepping stone to a fulfilling career in product design.
“It’s helped me suggest when and how to study our product’s end user to ensure we’re building something that people want to use and will be able to use effectively,” she says.
Here, Yingli shares how her role contributes to the customer experience, why she values the company’s culture of continuous learning, and advice for those striving to forge a career at Capital One.
What led to your job at Capital One, and how did you know the company would be a good fit?
During the application process, I learned from a Capital One associate that many Americans lose sleep over financial concerns. They highlighted that as a designer at Capital One, they empathize with customers and seek to understand their reactions to stressful situations and experiences. From that understanding and knowledge comes innovative and intuitive experiences designed to alleviate customers’ anxieties and stress. I felt comforted knowing that the Capital One design team took the designer’s role as the “voice of the customer” to heart. As I continued to hear that sentiment throughout the recruitment process, I identified with the core “customer-first” values and now that I’ve joined the company, I can say that sentiment is still central to all we do.
What are your day-to-day responsibilities in your role?
When I’m designing, I’m almost always using Figma to create new screens for new products or resources for teammates to use. A lot of designing is about ensuring existing brand design guidelines are followed while creating brand-new material and experiences. We’re always using visuals to communicate our ideas, from the early stages of a product idea to the final design’s review.
When I’m not working on designs, you can find me facilitating office hours as a subject-matter expert, sharing work, providing feedback in a group session with my team, or attending sessions to gain a better understanding of the latest and greatest user research and trends. Plus, I spend a big part of my week connecting with my product and development teammates to talk through progress on our latest work, lean on each other for ideas, and complete quality assurance on development efforts.
How does your specific role support tech and banking functions so they help customers?
Whenever a customer interacts with our website or logs in to the app, someone has designed that experience for them. Many people interpret this as “We need a design for this idea we’ve come up with—can we ask the designer to make us something to look at, approve, and then build?” Often, the task is a lot more ambiguous.
We might be asked about something as specific as communicating to customers about a limited-time offer or something as broad as “What information do customers need before making a payment?” In the case of the limited-time offer, we might need to consider what information to remove or anonymize. How much of the page should we designate to the offer, knowing that we want it to be visible but not frustrating to customers? For the more ambiguous, information-based question, we need to know how customers think, feel and act before deciding how to synthesize that information into a product strategy and early design iterations.
Our work requires proactive problem-solving—a large part of being a product designer in financial technology involves planning and thinking ahead. Using the research and data we’ve gathered about our customers’ desired user experience, we try to decide what design will best suit the customer’s goals while handling sensitive financial information and anticipating any customer needs, concerns, or problems before they arise.
Can you tell me about the Accounts Payable (formerly Pay Vendors) project you worked on that was mentioned in Fast Company?
The Pay Vendors project (now Accounts Payable) was our first foray into collaborating with a third-party organization to bring a business-specific product to our customers in our servicing platform. Introducing Accounts Payable was a huge leap forward for our small business card offerings. It was both a creative and technical challenge because we didn’t have similar projects to compare with our design process or to leverage as a template in terms of timeline and process. We were learning and growing at an accelerated, startup-like pace. I learned so much about collaboration and thinking critically, and quickly when working with our partners to launch this project. I can’t understate how proud I was to see the design work acknowledged by Fast Company as one of their most innovative enterprise products of the year.
What are some other projects you’ve worked on?
I’ve been lucky to work on a variety of projects, including designing our credit card home page, strategizing and building our customer’s compare cards experience, and creating and refining our product-matching quiz. I now work on modernizing the business account servicing experience and our business insights.
What’s one highlight of your career thus far at Capital One, and why?
One that I value is being recognized by my cross-functional product, tech, and design team as “the glue that holds the team together” when working on Pay Vendors. I appreciated that my efforts were acknowledged throughout the product launch, and I take pride in being a good communicator and helpful teammate. Being a designer often means bridging different teams to ensure we launch a cohesive end product.
Why is Capital One a great place for product designers and managers to work?
One of the things that surprised me when I first joined Capital One was the sheer variety of design roles. For example, Capital One has departments for auto-finance, consumer credit cards and bank products, small and mid-market business teams, and product teams that work on internal-facing tools. Often, UX or customer experience designers are staffed in all of these areas. I’ve had a few cool experiences to learn from and meet other designers working on radically different products than myself. I often learn a lot about new design practices and workflow processes by interacting with these teams.
You follow Herbert Simon’s mantra “change existing situations into preferred ones” to guide your work. How does this show up in your work at Capital One?
For me, that quote symbolizes how we’re rarely starting from scratch when it comes to design. We have to apply a customer lens to understand the existing world and experiences we have today and decide how work could be better than what exists now. At the heart of the quote, there’s a push for thoughtful, continuous progress with anything we create—with the implication that anyone who is thinking about and implementing change for the better is a designer.
In my daily work at Capital One, that mantra reminds me to continuously reflect on what we put out in the world, knowing that our work and experiences should always change and be incrementally improved through conscious design and listening to our user’s needs.
What resources does Capital One provide to help your professional and personal development?
My managers have always encouraged me to take on new learning opportunities within the company.
I’ve been able to attend a few design conferences and learning opportunities, including Figma’s in-person conference, Config, and the Nielsen Norman Group’s training sessions. Config was a wonderful opportunity to connect with peers in other businesses and learn from leading designers across industries through speaker sessions. The Nielsen Norman Group training sessions allowed me to learn niche skills, like basics in user experience analytics and designing complex applications for specialized domains.
What other benefits, resources, or groups have contributed to your success here?
I joined Capital One through our Design Development Program (DDP), and I love everyone I met through the DDP. The sense of community and each designer’s unique flair make for a great onboarding experience, and I still connect with my class of DDPs often. Structurally, I loved being able to rotate teams over the two years to expand my skill set across projects and areas of the business, and I met more people that way in the early days at the company.
Finally, what advice would you give prospective candidates hoping to pursue a career at Capital One?
Specifically in design, taking a complex idea and communicating it back to someone at the same level of complexity or simpler shows comprehension in an interview session. Being able to iterate quickly on concepts while highlighting how they solve different user needs can show your breadth of creativity and your ability to analyze the hypothetical value of your designs. Knowing when to ask for more information or when a competitive analysis might be more helpful than building from scratch demonstrates foresight and shows that you’re thinking carefully about the challenge in front of you.
In general, foster meaningful and genuine relationships with those around you during the interview process. People will be honest with you, especially if you’re honest with them about what you’re looking for. I’ve found that I have a lot of agency to ask questions and have never been turned away from trying to learn more!