Teaching Quality
Weekly Native Knowledge Fest
Scope
Enterprise-wide native design education program for Capital One's Experience Design organization. Cross-functional audience of 300+ designers, product managers, and engineers across multiple lines of business. Seven months of weekly live sessions with recorded video library for ongoing access.
Role
Program Creator and Lead Instructor. Proposed the initiative to VP-level leadership, developed the full curriculum, co-authored content with a content strategist and junior designer, tracked attendance and design review data to measure impact, and iterated the program in real time based on findings.
Overview
As Capital One grew its design organization, many designers were assigned to native app work without deep platform knowledge. Android and iPad experiences were suffering and customer-facing quality had declined. I proposed and created WNKF, a weekly 30-minute training series to close knowledge gaps, build confidence, and standardize native design quality across iOS and Android. I designed every session to be inclusive and accessible, applying the Goldilocks framework developed by our content strategist to ensure content landed "just right" for a diverse audience of designers, product managers, and engineers.
The Challenge
Capital One’s consumer servicing apps had lost ground in quality, particularly across Android and tablet experiences.
- Many designers lacked native app experience — especially Android.
- Features were breaking in production (e.g., landscape issues, missed accessibility targets).
- Teams were designing mobile apps like mobile web.
- Designers felt uneasy asking questions in reviews or critiques.
- Design reviews consistently flagged the same UX/UI errors across LOBs.
Approach
I worked with VP-level leadership to carve out a new quality-focused role, then built the program from the ground up. I created WNKF as a recurring weekly series focused on platform fundamentals and mobile design best practices, co-authoring the curriculum with a content strategist and junior designer. Early sessions prioritized accessibility, motion, grid structure, and platform behavior differences — the areas where design review data showed the most consistent failures.
I designed every session using the Goldilocks framework, a narrative model for accessible teaching developed by our content strategist, ensuring content was complex enough to be useful but approachable enough that designers at any level felt confident engaging.
Initial attendance surveys revealed the breadth of our audience, from seasoned native designers to product managers and engineers with no design background. This diversity shaped every curriculum decision.
To make sure the program stayed relevant, I reported directly into the VP of Experience Quality and partnered closely with design reviewers and subject matter experts. I tracked attendance and cross-referenced it with design QA results in real time, using what I found in reviews to refine upcoming sessions and address problem areas as they surfaced. The training and the quality process fed each other continuously.
How We Measured Success
Measuring the impact of an educational program required looking beyond attendance. I tracked multiple signals in parallel to build a meaningful picture of effectiveness.
Our attendees
- I took detailed attendance. Using the tools in Zoom, I could track everyone that joined, how long they stayed and when they dropped.
- In a spreadsheet, I tracked:
- each person that attended a session
- where they aligned (Design/Product/Engineering and line of business)
- how long they stayed on the call
- who accessed the recording of the session that was posted immediately after the call.
Design was required to bring any new flows through a review process. There was a well documented checklist that product and design could use as a guide to ensure the work aligned with the design system and its respective platform.
A cross-platform design checklist aligned to Apple HIG and Material Design guidelines, used across Capital One's native design review process to standardize quality and production readiness.
From weekly design reviews
- I meticulously tracked design review results and feedback - documenting specific line items that didn't pass review.
- I tracked the project, line of business and designer.
- During training sessions I would sometimes pivot and address problem areas that arose in reviews.
- Over time, I began to cross reference and compare the collected data.
After nearly every session, regardless of who attended that week, results consistently landed in the "just right" zone, validating the curriculum approach across a constantly shifting audience.
Outcomes & Impacts
- 20+ sessions delivered, including guest speakers and deep dives on platform-specific patterns
- Attendance grew to 100–200 designers per session
- Peer feedback consistently praised clarity, tone, and usefulness
- Design review failure rates dropped measurably in lines of business with high WNKF participation
- Designers began proactively reaching out for feedback before QA
- VPs began requiring attendance for designers in struggling areas
- Contributed to a 30% reduction in production errors by reducing the design inconsistencies that drove downstream rework and tech debt
- Content still in use through an accessible internal video library
Retrospective
I have always loved mentoring. There is something deeply satisfying about helping someone click into a new level of understanding. WNKF took that instinct and scaled it in ways I never expected.
What started as a response to a quality gap became one of the most rewarding things I built at Capital One. Sharing the expertise I had developed over years of native platform work, and watching it ripple across the organization, felt meaningful in a way that shipping a single feature never quite does. This was my chance to make sure the hard work and standards my original flagship team had established continued to live on, even as the organization grew and changed around it.
I was also genuinely proud of how we approached measurement. Tracking attendance, cross-referencing design review data, and iterating the curriculum in real time based on what we were seeing in QA — that rigor mattered to me. It wasn't enough to run a popular program. I wanted to know it was actually working.
Course Feedback
"Kim authored and presented a series of brown bags around various design considerations (e.g. mobile, UDAAP examples, etc). It was some of the most thoughtful and insightful material I’ve ever seen, and I told Kim afterwards that across the many dozens of designers I’ve worked with over the years, only maybe 3 people including her possessed the breadth and depth needed to pull together that kind of rich material."
~ VP of Upper Funnel Product, Achieve
“You’ve helped me SO so much and all the wonderful knowledge aside, I just appreciate how genuine you are as a person and colleague.”
~ New XD team member, via Slack
“The class was great! It was presented in a very interesting and fun way. Learned a lot about design differences between iOS and Android.”
“It was awesome! Learned a lot in just 20 minutes.”
“This was really useful to me, hoping this can be longer.”
“I was vibing with all the material and felt like it just wasn’t long enough to cover everything. It was amazing though! I can’t wait for the next class! ^-^”
“I like the analogies and imagery – especially Adam Hillman’s assemblage work! Looking forward to getting into more detail.”
~ Anonymous attendees
