Case Study: HealthEquity Account Card Lock

2025

TL;DR

HealthEquity is a nationwide provider of health and other savings accounts (HSA, FSAs, etc.).

For most accounts, a debit-style card is provided to be able to withdraw funds to pay for medical or other qualified expenses

I led the design effort to explore our top-requested security feature: the ability to lock or freeze your account card temporarily for security or to control spending

Impact

Market parity in account card features

Increased member satisfaction with card features and security

Problem

For all of the innovations on the HealthEquity platform, one of the most-requested new features was the ability to lock or "freeze" your physical account card if it was suspected lost or stolen, if you were traveling or just wanted to control spending.

Competitive Analysis

We studied how other bank systems or apps were implementing similar features. Some examples:

$Competitive analysis showing various banking mobile apps and their different card lock processes\$

Solutions

In presenting designs to stakeholders, it became clear that the best approach would be the one that more closely mapped traditional banking, with a "lock card" button and a confirmation dialog making sure that the user would be aware of what would follow. Early testing with wireframes bore this out, so the only matter was to begin mapping some of the many edge cases we would encounter.

Screen Flow: Default Path (mobile)

Screen flow diagram of card lock process

Screen Flow: User Card Not Activated (mobile)

Screen flow diagram for when a user's card is not activated

Selected Final Mockups (Desktop)

Desktop mockup of card lock confirmation dialog

Selected Final Mockups (iOS)

Mobile app mockup of card lock confirmation

Mobile app mockup of locked account card

Lessons Learned

Although this project seemed small from the outset, there were a couple of hurdles to get over:

Have a plan for the edge cases

For what seemed like a straightforward lock-and-unlock user flow, there turned out to be a surprising number of edge cases that I needed to account for. Anything from an invalid card, card service failure, unactivated card, and plenty more added up to where the Product Owner and I worked on a new system of organizing my Figma files so that she could more easily find which cases she was after.

Make room for the important stuff

Luckily we caught this issue early on and could plan for it, otherwise it might have ended up a roadmap disaster. Since this particular feature update touched card operations and finance, it required approvals from the card issuer, and then from Compliance and Legal on our side. Each of these round trips could easily add another week or two to the timeline.