Citizens Bank

Senior UX Designer

Guiding digital transformation with UX

Role

Citizens Bank was going through a pivotal digital-first transformation for it's main banking and lending services. My role as a Senior UX Designer within Citizen’s in-house studio was to guide and define UX goals and strategy. I accomplished this be being embedded in business verticals, working closely with stakeholders and product owners.

Duties

Wireframing, User Testing, Design System Library, Prototyping, High Fidelity Design

SELECTED PROJECTS

Work Title

PROJECT

Citizens Bank X-Sell Module

Sitiuation

Citizens Lending Service was launching a new online platform to provide a best in class student loan refinance application & origination experience.

I designed and delivered the UX for post-loan submission, which included UX flows and mock-ups for user dashboards, account settings, and numerous identity verification tasks.

With overall platform design delivered, the stakeholders requested an ad space that cross-promoted other Citizens Bank products that could benefit the user during the origination process.

Analyzing a Design Opportunity

The stakeholder's request to place traditional style banner ads were well intentioned, but from an overall customer experience, could undermine the UX modernization of the platform. Visual clutter or banner blindness could affect conversion and take away from a slick experience.

Defining a Goal

I approached the request by defining what the business goals and success metrics were for their proposed cross-sell banner ad space.

Questions that needed to be answered:

What was their core business need independent from their prescriptive execution?
Why should the user care? What are their priorities?
What were some early design ideas I could explore to solve this?

Outdated design patterns the stakeholders were recommending I use.

User flow for that diagrams the application to cross-sell process.

It's a Discount, Not an Ad

After further discussions with the product owner and investigating other areas at the bank, I was able to establish a strong foundation for a solution.

If the user enrolls, they’ll get a discount on their pending loan interest rate. More of a loyalty program than an ad.
Other implementations of this loyalty program had high sign up rates, so the base success metric is to meet this.
UserZoom testing showed that the current dashboard design is easily understandable, so our new design shouldn’t detract.

With this new context, I created wireframes for proposed UI that's more card-like than banner ad. This approaches the problem as a way to inform about savings, rather than shout and sell.

My proposed cross-sell module followed Citizens' design system fluid column grid.

Crafting a Modular Solution

My proposed system was more flexible and modular than what the stakeholders originally asked for, and it allowed for faster implementation no matter how many promos or different places they wanted to run them.

As I started the final high fidelity pass of the design I checked in with UX designers in other verticals to ensure consistency across the Citizens design system.

Other design system cards that can be used to iterate from.

Visual Design for MVP Rollout

The final design was applied to the first iteration of the loan dashboard as a single column spanning module but can easily scale to 3 thanks to my design pre-planning and specs.

The design is content-centric and is an easier cognitive load for the user on a busy page like this dashboard. The opening title and CTA speak for itself.

Examples of how this can integrate into other column widths and configured even more minimally if needed.

Result

My design spec was approved by the product owner and was implemented into the new lending platform launch.