Skills: User research, UX, Digital strategy
Team: UX designer, Business analyst, Visual designer

I led a cross-disciplinary team at Splendid to carry out research with many of Barclaycard’s business teams.

We came armed with the new strategy report that Barclaycard had commissioned with another agency. Our work was to interpret this in practice and propose a roadmap to structure and communicate digital initiatives over upcoming 'horizons.'

Business Challenge

To develop a coordinated stream of innovation across digital touchpoints.

Customer Insight

Silo’d business units and incompatible infrastructure made progress slow. Dense strategic planning didn’t clarify what was meant in real tangible terms.

Service Vision 

To bring the disparate business units together with a shared roadmap for how barclaycard’s strategy could come to life.

Process

To be able to propose a way forward, I first took a measure of where the company was at currently using various techniques to build up this picture, including; mapping the competitive landscape, interviewing business leaders and teams, desk research and collaboration with the strategy agency.  

In carrying out this process it became clear that the goals of the business teams were not aligned and they lacked the visibility across the organisation of the various initiatives that were underway.

Coupled with this there were significant infrastructure issues which hampered the ability of highly motivated teams to be able to achieve their goals.

Outcome

I compiled our findings into a couple of key visualisations; the Big Picture and the Roadmap.
The big picture stakeholder map gave Barclaycard a high level view of the activity of the business teams by illustrating projects, opinions, relationships and dependencies.  It was a useful tool to be able to quickly get a snapshot of the complexity of the many actors involved and where potential difficulties and opportunities exist.

The roadmap presented a more formally structured view of how this activity should fit into the wider strategic vision. This took into account other workstreams I was involved in such as the redesign of mybarclaycard.com and the barclaycard wallet and mapped the activity by touchpoint into three broad phases indicated by the strategic vision. This gave the client a clearly prioritised schedule of work that could be planned.

Concepts

The discovery work led directly into a phase of service concepts and prototyping, one of which was for a new cashback card.