Product Design Financial Services Travel Experience

BBVA —
Travel Experience:
Built for the journey.

BBVA's premium card customers had strong travel benefits and weren't using them. Redesign went from research to production-ready prototype in 87 days — validating the design with real users before any engineering investment.

The Challenge

Strong benefits.
Low engagement.

BBVA's premium card customers had access to a genuine set of travel benefits — lounge access, travel insurance, concierge services, and booking rewards. Internal data showed low engagement across the board. Customers weren't using what they had, and card preference research suggested travel was a significant factor in competitive switching.

A travel-native competitor had built a differentiated in-app travel experience that was gaining ground with the same demographic. BBVA needed to understand why their customers weren't engaging — and design something better before the next product cycle.

The challenge wasn't adding more benefits. It was making the existing ones feel like a product rather than a perk — one that customers encountered naturally as part of how they used their banking app.

How We Worked

Research, concepts, validation —
then prototype.

Redesign ran a 100-day product design sprint: research to concept to validated design — compressed to give BBVA something testable before committing engineering resources.

01
Research — 32 customers across 3 markets
32 qualitative interviews with BBVA premium card customers across 3 markets. Research focused on how customers currently discover, activate, and use travel benefits — and where the experience falls apart. Supplemented by competitive audit of 8 travel-focused financial products, including card-native apps, travel portals, and lifestyle banking applications.
02
Concept design — 3 directions, 3 philosophies
Three distinct product directions developed, each built around a different core design philosophy: integration-first (weaving travel into existing app flows), journey-first (building around how customers actually plan and travel), and benefit-first (making the benefits themselves the primary navigation layer). Each direction designed to a level of fidelity sufficient for user testing.
03
Validation — One direction selected and built to spec
User testing with the target segment across all three directions. Clear preference emerged for the journey-first approach, with specific modifications surfaced by users that improved usability in the two highest-friction moments. That direction taken from rough prototype to full production-ready design specification — ready for engineering handover.
The Outcome

87 days. Validated prototype.
Zero engineering waste.

87
Days from kick-off to production-ready prototype
32
Customers researched across 3 markets
3
Concept directions tested with real users before selection

BBVA's internal engineering team received a production-ready design specification, validated with real users before a single line of product code was written. The 87-day timeline kept BBVA inside their product planning cycle, with validated design in hand for the next release.

The engagement demonstrated the value of validating before building: three directions tested, one selected based on user evidence — not internal opinion. The alternative would have been committing engineering to one direction and discovering the problem after months of build.

Building a product that hasn't
been validated yet?

Redesign compresses the cycle from idea to tested prototype — without skipping the research. Validate before you build.

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