A Three-Bureau Credit Report for Everyone

A white cat sleeping on a bed with a beige blanket.

TL;DR

Equifax needed a standout product to strengthen consumer trust and engagement.

My team and I transformed overwhelming and indecipherable credit reports from all three bureaus into an effortless tool for understanding your credit history and empowering you to improve. The results were wildly popular, with users rating it 8.8 / 10

Background

Equifax had endured a few hard years and needed to demonstrate its commitment to consumers. So as the company refreshed its brand and IT systems, it started looking for premium features that would attract customers and build confidence. In collaboration with our team, an idea emerged: Enable users to view and compare all of their credit information across Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion, and help them take steps to improve their credit scores.

The catch? Look at this thing. We needed to turn this (and two more reports like it) into simplicity itself.

The Challenge

Deceptively-Complex Offerings

Equifax initially saw this as a pure data-visualization exercise with no self-service or support baked in.

Limiting Design System

Equifax’s design system was strong on basic navigation but weaker when it came to navigating data.

Missing User Guidance

The concepts behind credit scores can be tricky to say the least. Equifax’s approach to education needed to grow.

Information Overload

Standard credit reports are dense, jargon-filled documents that most consumers find impenetrable.

My Role

  • Led the Macquarium engagement with Equifax

  • Drove all discovery, strategy, and design activities

  • Planned and facilitated workshops for customer journey mapping, affinity mapping, design co-creation, and testing review

  • Created both conceptual and detail designs while overseeing junior designers doing the same

  • Ensured thorough quality assurance in a very complex set of interactive prototypes across multiple platforms

  • Served as the primary liaison with Usability Sciences

  • Collaborated with Equifax and our project management team on scheduling, resourcing, and cost

  • And, just for fun, booked the hotel rooms.

Our Approach

1. Discovery & Product Strategy

We started with a series of workshops to surface user pain points, technical constraints, and success metrics —anchoring the design in our twin goals of “caveman simplicity” and “educate & empower.” Equifax had already carried out extensive consumer research, courtesy of a pair of brilliant champions of the customer-first mentality. We eagerly took in their data and worked with them to brainstorm a series of features that would put American consumers in the driver’s seat of their credit histories.

2. Highly-Parallel Design

Our timeline was extremely aggressive. This meant that we had to keep every team member fully committed and productive at all times. The dev team in particular had to be constantly fed work along the way. Based on the complexity of a portion of the overall solution together with its priority, each element was rapidly put through a design assembly line. Cross-discipline collaborators were pulled in on a daily basis with their contributions tailored to the needs of each element and our overall release strategy.

3. Progressive Design System Build-Out

The schedule didn’t leave room to create a full design system before we moved into building pages. So while we worked with GNG and our Business Analyst on requirements, a “starter kit” was built to provide initial styles and the components we knew we’d need. From there, and over the life of the project, this kit was continually expanded (with central governance) to capture every new component or style we needed. By go-live, we had everything we’d need to support future work more efficiently.

4. Lab-Based Focus Groups

Everyone packed their bags for sunny Dallas, where we spent three days at Usability Sciences, a user testing lab par excellence (seriously, I love these guys). Together, we ran as many as four focus groups per day to pick apart what worked and (even more importantly) what didn’t. This can be a bit of an emotional rollercoaster for clients, but our champions could see that getting crystal-clear direction means that some things will be wrong on the first pass. We gathered both quantitative and qualitative feedback on our competing concepts and carried out an in-depth review workshop to refine our design direction.

5. Responsive Wireframing & Prototyping

Back home, we pushed ahead with to rework the most promising overall concept. Our ability to produce cutting-edge visuals was constrained by Equifax’s design kit. But that kit provided enough for us to refine the concept it into a much better version of itself. We prepared highly-interactive prototype covering both desktop and mobile devices. Features were refined, additional helper elements added, and secondary & error paths accounted for. After a healthy dose of QA and more reviews with Equifax stakeholders, we were feeling downright bullish.

6. Lab-Based Usability Testing

A month after the focus groups, it was back to Dallas. This time, we knew we had the right overall direction and we strode through the airport like rock stars on our way to four days of in-person usability testing. The initial response was fantastic, but we knew we could do even better and wanted to make the most of this opportunity. So each night we stayed up in our hotel. With the help of alarming amounts of caffeine, we refined the prototype based on the day’s feedback, tested it for quality, and shipped it for the next morning. After three rounds of this we were both delirious, mostly with pride. Mostly.

7. Fine Tuning & Delivery

At the end of our second round in Dallas, we knew we had something special. We went home and met with a broader set of business & IT stakeholders (along with our friends at Usability Sciences) to present our design, our findings, and our recommendations. Buy-in was immediate; the next step was to implement a final set of tweaks and ship it to Equifax IT. So we focused on talking with Equifax’s IT team and on adding the assets, views, and annotations they’d need for success. On the downside, development would be drawn-out and largely out of our hands. We also wouldn’t be able to access analytics data due to Equifax IT policies. But so long as the production version was close to what we’d designed, we knew the 3B report had a chance to be a winner.

The Solution

Quick score comparison and modular reporting with built-in alerts

Responsive design with tabbed multi-bureau comparison

Credit history drill-down views with natural reading patterns and quick consumer actions

Guided deep credit score diagnosis

Walkthroughs and helper content to educate consumers

Focused view for quick checkups

The Results

User Rating

8.8/10

We had a goal of testers giving the 3-bureau report an average rating of 7.5. By the time we finished, we were well beyond our target.

Pro-Consumer Benefits

A number of testers had felt like the credit “deck” was stacked against them. The 3-bureau report gave them a real sense of control. Many said they finally felt motivated and empowered to take control of their credit scores.

Elated Stakeholders

Equifax’s Product, Marketing, and Customer Support teams were thrilled. Complaints & call center volume would decrease while consumers newly embracing Equifax would drive increased revenue.