A bank café where the wall talks back

After a decade of financial‑literacy campaigns the message still was not getting through. A wall that everyone could see, showing the same thing to everyone, could only ever be ambient.

The cafés had four goals: improve the financial health of the surrounding community, win more primary banking relationships, bring browsing back to banking, and build brand equity. Explore 1.0 did the inspiring part well. Its weaknesses were structural: it served the same content to every customer whatever their financial state, and anything sensitive, a credit score, a budget, could not go on a public screen at all. Meanwhile every bank was now “changing banking”, so ambient messaging was no longer a difference, and it was not enough to drive action.

1. An orchestration engine. Manage and personalise interactions across the whole café, on premise first, then a central recommendation server.
2. Personal device content. Deliver existing and new content straight to the customer’s own phone.
3. An SMS interface. The simplest possible bridge between the wall and the phone in your hand: text a code, get a link.

1. 1

   Give the wall a phone.

   The private things move to the private screen. The wall says Text to 12345 for more info; your phone opens a page that says the average credit score in Back Bay is 712, with CreditWise it is 741, then shows your own summary and key factors. The wall gets to be provocative and public; the phone gets to be personal. A text message was chosen as the handoff because everyone can do it with no app installed.

   Turned down: starting with an app download. The app is the last button on the phone page, not the first ask on the wall.

2. 2

   Make it a game people play together.

   Customer‑led games the crowd can join from their phones: Savings Smash, a brick‑breaker that drops a nugget about saving between levels and keeps a café leaderboard. Ambassador‑led games for the room: Financial Jeopardy with categories like What’s the credit score and The right card, and a Wheel of Good Fortune. Group play turns a wall people walk past into something they stop for, and it gives the café ambassadors a reason to start a conversation.

   Turned down: more ambient video. Explore 1.0 already proved people would look; 2.0 had to make them do something.

3. 3

   Teach the wall the neighbourhood.

   City Explore plays beautiful 4K video of the café’s own city and serves local data over it, the median household income in Boston, say, with a tap to go deeper. Hyper‑local quizzes ask what the average credit score in Boston is and take answers by text, then show how the room did. Behind it, the audience work: three segments by café location, Laptops and Lattes, Metro Renters and Trendsetters, aged 30 to 47, earning 47k to 115k, each with a different financial goal.

   Turned down: one national content loop. The same wall in Seattle and South Florida should not say the same thing.

• DeliveredExplore Vision 2.0, an 89‑page working vision for Capital One, 9 August 2016: the SWOT on Explore 1.0, the three technology steps, near‑term concepts for action, community, group play and intimate interaction, the audience data and the roadmap
• FramedFour strategic pillars the café programme could grow along: smarter use of data, more intimate interactions, playful and actionable content, and a stronger community vibe

I was an experience designer on the Huge team for the Explore 2.0 vision: the near‑term concepts, the wall‑to‑phone interactions and the screens that show them. Huge’s strategy team led the audience and technology work with Capital One’s café team.