DISCOVER PROJECT
Mercado Pago
Card Activation Journey
Turning a linear onboarding flow into a modular, contextual system
2025
— Many users activated their card but never made a first purchase. They could not find the right moment to use it, and faced cognitive barriers about how it worked. The existing journeys ignored the user's temporal and financial context.
SERVICES
Benchmarking, Flow analysis, Information architecture, User flow, User journey, AI-assisted research
Project Overview
Close the gap between activating a card and making the first purchase, by aligning communication with the moment the user is actually ready to spend.
Discovery work and A/B tests on the first-use journey showed that extending communication through the first month improved activation. That learning opened a deeper iteration of the activation journeys for both physical and virtual cards.
The challenge was not awareness. Users knew they had a card. They did not know when, or how, to use it.
Approach
I used The Hook Model as a theoretical base to read the existing flow, and found a gap between the external trigger, our communication, and the internal trigger, the motivation that actually drives someone to use the product.
I benchmarked other players in the market, mapped the current physical activation, virtual activation and card linking flows, and identified the use cases and opportunities in each.
Process
I researched purchase behaviour across markets and confirmed that the moment people receive their salary is directly related to consumption. The analysis showed that many users did not complete a first purchase because they could not identify the right moment, did not understand how to use the card, or confused it with a credit product.
With those insights we redefined the journey, moving from a linear flow to a modular, contextual system where each communication is triggered by the user's temporal and financial moment, complemented by an animation designed to reduce cognitive friction at the first purchase. I used Claude to query BigQuery and run the data analysis, which made it faster to summarise findings and frame the problem, and to turn raw meeting notes into structured minutes and next steps.
Meet people at the moment they are ready, instead of asking them to be ready at ours.
Final Design
A modular activation journey where communication adapts to context instead of following a fixed calendar, designed to scale across markets with different salary cycles and spending habits.
Each piece of the journey became a module that can be activated, reordered or replaced per market, instead of a single linear sequence that had to be rebuilt every time. The visual exploration of those pieces was supported by generative image tools.
Achievements
