Capital One Bank App Redesign

Role: UX Designer
Tools: Figma, Notion, Miro

Why Redesign?

I’ve evaluated numerous banking applications, recognizing their critical role as highly utilized daily tools for millions of users. Among these, I’ve identified the Capital One mobile app as a prime candidate for a redesign.

Functionality:

My extensive interaction with various banking platforms has revealed significant opportunities for improvement in Capital One’s app, particularly in its user interface (UI) and navigational efficiency. Users frequently struggle to locate key functionalities due to an unintuitive layout, which prolongs task completion and undermines the seamless experience expected from a daily-use app.

Visual Design:

The app’s visual design feels dated and lacks the modern appeal necessary to engage users effectively or reflect Capital One’s innovative brand identity.

A Bank app should be:

A well-designed banking app saves users time and effort, fostering loyalty by making financial management effortless and intuitive. A comprehensive redesign—focused on streamlined navigation, intuitive information architecture, and a visually compelling aesthetic—would enhance usability, boost user satisfaction, and strengthen user retention by aligning the app with contemporary design standards and the demands of frequent use.

Project Goal

To redesign the Capital One mobile app with a cleaner, more intuitive interface that reduces cognitive load, streamlines core tasks, and rebuilds user trust—ultimately improving engagement and retention.

Goals:

• Users can complete their purpose faster  

• Improved visual hierarchy and content clarity

• Increased ease-of-use based on user testing feedback

Understand the Product

To understand the product thoroughly, I conducted a comprehensive analysis of the Capital One mobile app to identify its strengths and areas for improvement. 

This process began with competitive research, benchmarking the app against leading banking applications in the market to evaluate its positioning and feature set relative to industry standards

Heuristic evaluation of current app

Redundant Features: Key actions like “Move” and “Pay” are duplicated across multiple areas, including the navigation bar and within the checking account page—creating unnecessary complexity.

• Outdated UI: The visual design is overly simplistic and lacks the polish, hierarchy, and visual cues users expect from a modern financial app.

• Disjointed Product Experience: Different Capital One products (credit cards, checking, savings, Auto, Business etc) exist in separate apps or experiences; this redesign unifies them into a single, streamlined platform.

• Misaligned Navigation Priorities: Non-primary actions like “Help” and “Profile” are placed in the main navigation bar, pushing critical actions lower in the user’s visual priority.

• Irrelevant Home Page Content: A location map appears on the homepage—taking up space better used for personalized financial summaries or quick actions.

Gain deeper insights

I have synthesized insights from user interviews with five Capital One bank app users and summarized pain points they had when using the app below. 

User Interview

Pain Points: 

"Menu structure is confusing, making it difficult to locate advanced features."

"Half the time doesn't work, it leads to an external links, not within the app" 

Reframe the problems into Questions

These HMW questions serve as a foundation for ideation and prototyping, focusing on addressing user frustrations with navigation, design, performance, and functionality,

By tackling these challenges, the Capital One mobile app can deliver a more intuitive, modern, and user-friendly experience, aligning with user expectations and competitive standards.

1. Unintuitive Navigation and Cluttered Interface
   How might we enables users to quickly locate and access advanced features?

2. Outdated Visual Design
   How might we create a sleek, engaging, and contemporary aesthetic that aligns with industry standards?

3. Lack of Advanced Financial Wellness Tools
   How might we empower users with comprehensive financial management capabilities?

Focus on the most impactful issues

Based on the identified pain points and “How Might We” (HMW) questions from user feedback, I outline the proposed MVP features, prioritized for their impact on user experience and feasibility.

1. Streamlined Navigation and Menu Structure

• Why: Users consistently report frustration with the app’s unintuitive navigation, citing difficulty locating features like bill payments and transfers, which hinders daily use.

• MVP Solution: Redesign the information architecture to create a simplified, intuitive menu structure. Prioritize frequently used features with a tab-based or hierarchical navigation system, reducing clicks to access core functions.

2. Modernized Visual Design

• Why: The app’s outdated aesthetic is a common complaint, described as “clunky” and less engaging compared to competitors like Chase, reducing its appeal for frequent users.

• MVP Solution: Update the app’s visual design to align with modern design standards, focusing on a clean, minimalist aesthetic with consistent typography, color schemes, and iconography.

3. Advanced Financial Wellness Tools

• Why: Users frequently express frustration over the Capital One mobile app’s lack of advanced financial wellness tools, such as budgeting, spending analysis, and goal-setting features. Reviews highlight that the app offers only basic account management (e.g., “money in, money out” modules)

• MVP Solution: Introduce a basic set of financial wellness tools to address user demand for budgeting and spending insights, designed to be feasible within the MVP scope while laying the groundwork for future enhancements.

Persona

To better understand the needs and pain points of Capital One’s users, I created a primary persona based on patterns found in real customer reviews and behavioral insights. 

This persona captures key frustrations, goals, and expectations of everyday users, helping guide design decisions that prioritize clarity, efficiency, and trust.

Sitemap

To establish a clear and user-friendly information hierarchy, I created a sitemap outlining the primary structure of the Capital One app. 

The goal was to simplify navigation by grouping related features together, minimizing redundancy, and making high-priority actions—like viewing accounts and making transfers—more accessible.

 This structure serves as the foundation for an intuitive user journey and supports a more scalable design system moving forward. 

User Flow

To ensure a more intuitive and efficient experience, I redesigned the core user flow for one of Capital One’s most frequently used actions. The original app had duplicated features and unclear pathways, which caused confusion and slowed down task completion.

I focused on simplifying this journey by minimizing steps, clarifying options, and grouping related actions logically. The revised flow allows users to complete a transfer in just a few taps, with clear labeling, smart recipient selection, and real-time confirmation.

Wireframe

I translated key user flows into low-fidelity wireframes to establish the structure and layout of essential screens on Figma. 

These wireframes focused on simplifying navigation, reducing redundancy, and prioritizing core banking actions—ensuring users can complete tasks quickly and intuitively before moving into visual design. 

Usability Testing

To validate the effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction of the MVP features for the Capital One mobile app redesign, addressing key user pain points (unintuitive navigation, outdated visual design, performance issues, and lack of financial wellness tools) with a small, focused group of testers.

Methodology

• Participants: 5 users (ages 25–50, mix of genders, varying tech-savviness: freelancer, professional, small business owner, teacher, retiree).

Data Collection:

• Quantitative: Success rate, task time, error rate.

• Qualitative: Think-aloud feedback, satisfaction ratings (1–5), post-test interviews, SUS.

Results

Overall:

• Completion: 80% (met).

• Time: 18% reduction (exceeded).

• Satisfaction: 4.0/5 (met).

• SUS: 70 (met).

Reflection

• Successes: Navigation, design, and performance improvements enhanced usability; fraud alerts reduced support reliance.

• Challenges: Sub-menu clarity, UI contrast, and financial tool customization need refinement.

Key Improvements

• Unified Product Experience: Combined fragmented services—checking, credit cards, savings, loans, auto and business—into one seamless app, improving discoverability and consistency.

• Modernized Visual Design: Replaced the raw, outdated UI with a clean, modern interface that aligns with user expectations and competitor standards.

• Focused Navigation: Reorganized the bottom navigation bar to highlight high-priority banking tasks (e.g. “Accounts,” “Transfer,” “Pay”), while relocating secondary actions like “Help” and “Profile.”

• Decluttered Home Screen: Removed irrelevant elements like the branch location map and replaced them with personalized summaries and quick actions for better usability.

• Eliminated Redundancies: Streamlined duplicated functions (“Move” and “Pay”) to reduce confusion and create a more efficient task flow.

Final Thoughts & What I Learned

This project taught me the value of designing for clarity, especially in systems that have grown overly complex with time. 

I learned how to balance modern UI aesthetics with functionality, prioritize user intent over organizational structure, and streamline decision-making across redundant features.

Key Takeaways:

• Prioritizing core user actions creates clarity and confidence

• Consolidating multi-product ecosystems requires a strong information architecture

• Small visual improvements (like button hierarchy or icon consistency) can significantly impact usability