Credit Card Compare

About

Redesigned how people search, compare and apply for credit cards in Australia.

Client

Boyd Creative Australia Pty Ltd

Year & duration

2025

6 months (ongoing)

Role

Senior Product Designer. Owned the end-to-end redesign for market re-entry—from problem framing through delivery—working directly with founders, engineering, and compliance.

Context & Strategic Framing

When Credit Card Compare re-entered Australia, the market had become crowded and difficult to navigate. Most comparison sites presented large sets of similar cards through dense tables and filters, making it hard to understand which differences were meaningful.

Meanwhile, the way people expected to get an answer changed. The challenge wasn’t access to information—it was helping users reach a decision without having to analyze the entire market to get there.

Goals & Success Criteria

Make it easier for users to compare options and decide.

Success meant the product handled more of the filtering, explanation, and reconciliation work before asking users to choose—so the cognitive load no longer sat with them.

Problem Framing

Most comparison tables pack in data but do little to help people choose. When faced with long lists of similar cards, users scan and cross-check details, often second-guessing whether their filters match their real needs. The structure forces them to piece information together manually, which slows decisions and increases uncertainty.

Approach & UX Strategy

The experience was designed around helping users decide, not browse.

Instead of relying on a single flow, the product provides multiple entry points that reduce decision effort—narrowing options, simplifying comparison, and resolving uncertainty—without forcing users through a fixed sequence.

Shift the product from providing data to providing an answer.

The guiding principle

Key Decisions & Trade-offs

To support this transition from traditional browse-and-filter behavior, I designed three complementary tools.

Credit Card Matchmaker: a step-by-step tool that collects user needs and returns a curated set of cards instead of the full catalogue, which reduced reliance on category pages and shifted featured placements toward intent-driven results.

Side-by-side comparison: a view that presents key attributes—fees, rewards, balance transfers—at the same visual level to simplify evaluation, which required stricter data standardization to keep comparisons fair and consistent.

CardSense: an AI chat embedded in card pages that answers card-specific questions before application, which raised the bar for accuracy and scope so answers stayed reliable and appropriately bounded.

While the product is still under development, these implications were identified early and discussed with banks and issuers ahead of launch to align expectations.

Execution & Validation
Prototype testing focused on whether the experience reduced user effort before commitment. I wanted to find out:

Whether users could find relevant cards without browsing the full catalogue.
Whether users could understand what differentiated cards without cross-checking multiple tables.
Whether users felt confident applying without needing additional external research.

In testing, participants described the experience as easier to follow and more straightforward than traditional comparison sites. They found suitable cards faster and moved to the application step with clear intent.

These results suggested that moving the heavy lifting of filtering, comparing, and clarifying questions into the product reduced analysis paralysis while keeping users in control.

Credit Card Matchmaker™ & Calculators

Side by side comparison

CardSense™

Outcomes & Impact

Prototype testing redefined the team’s success criteria. The roadmap shifted from adding features to reducing time-to-decision and increasing user confidence. This clarity resolved feature debates and focused engineering on a decision-led architecture.

The redesign reduced traffic to category pages, impacting card placement and visibility. We addressed these changes early with banks and issuers, resetting expectations before launch and minimizing late-stage production risk.

Reflection & Next Steps

When products treat them as data challenges, users end up doing the interpretation work themselves. The solution is designing systems that help people decide without mastering the domain.

That principle applies beyond credit cards. The same decision architecture is now being considered as a foundation for Finty, our sister site serving other international markets across insurance, loans, and related financial products. The prototype validated the direction; the next phase is execution—building at scale, stress-testing data consistency, and preparing for launch.

Comparison experiences are fundamentally decision problems, not information problems.

Core insight