Empowering Customers to Regain Financial Freedom with EasyPay

Bread Financial

Role: Business strategy, research planning, user observation, user scenarios, design concepts, card sorting, user flows, testing plans, visual design, KPI definition, and UX project manager

Team: Content Strategist, UX Manager, Product Owner; ZoCo Design researchers, project manager, and principal.

Timeline: 6+ months

We hypothesized that by understanding and addressing the emotional and informational needs of cardholders in collections, we could encourage timely payments, restore spending power, and build long-term customer loyalty.

Problem

How might we empower cardholders in collections to settle debts online, maximizing payment revenue and restoring their spending power during a global crisis like COVID-19?We asked our friends from ZoCo Design to help us understand the mindset of cardmembers and answer this complex question.

EasyPay Problem

Key Learning
People in debt often feel overwhelmed and unsure of their options. They need clear information and a sense of understanding to feel confident in making payments.

Key Decision
We decided to focus on people who typically avoid dealing with debt collections, aiming to give them the tools and knowledge to take action and improve their financial situation.

A key part of making these users successful would be helping them understand their payment options and educating them on how the collections process works.

Solution

We learned that many customers don’t understand the collections process. This lack of understanding often leads to avoidance and anxiety. By providing clear and simple explanations, we could make the process less intimidating.

We took important moments from the customer experience and turned them into simple sketches to share with our partners and developers. They helped us decide which ideas would benefit customers and the business most while also being practical to create.

While voting, we granted extra points to any ideas the team thought would help educate customers on the collections process. Using the winning concepts, we set out to figure out the best way to present previously complex information to customers.

EasyPay Solution

We used interactive user flows to quickly refine how information was presented, model content, and organize key details. These flows also made it easier to secure approvals from developers and collections stakeholders, ensuring alignment across teams.

We tested our prototypes with real users to confirm the experience was easy to use and trustworthy. This helped us refine step-by-step guides, simplify language, and create a design that felt approachable and supportive for customers in collections.

A unique challenge was making EasyPay feel like a trusted advisor, offering a calming and supportive experience. Comenity, the company behind brands like IKEA and Victoria’s Secret credit cards, isn’t always familiar to users. We worked to build trust by designing a soft, approachable interface that avoided the stark, impersonal feel often seen in financial and collections materials.

Key Moment: I created a Figma prototype to help the development team understand user flows and transitions. This also allowed us to look at how we might use animation to make more complex parts of the experience feel more personal and relevant and less about money.

Impact

We felt we’d created a redesigned online payment tool that helped customers feel informed and supported. This led to an increase in trust, understanding, and payments compared to our initial user interview feedback:

20% more users said they found the site trustworthy.
32% more users understood their payment options.
Payments increased by 11%.

Reflection

Conversations with collections customers on a genuinely human level helped my team and I design with empathy and turn a stressful experience into a positive one.
Simple, clear information can help people take action and feel in control of situations that would otherwise introduce confusion and anxiety.

This project showed me how much impact thoughtful design can have on people’s lives, especially during difficult times. It reinforced the importance of putting people first.