Architect

Modernizing a legacy digital banking platform to reduce task failure and improve customer trust

Overview

Broadway National Bank’s digital banking platform was driving customer frustration and increasing operational costs due to poor usability in core financial tasks.

As a Product Designer at Fiserv, I led the redesign of their web and mobile banking experience, making deliberate tradeoffs between flexibility and clarity in order to improve task completion and restore user trust.


Primary outcomes:

  • Increased App Store ratings from 2.4 → 4.8 on Apple and Google Play

  • Recognized with the 2020 IDC Award for Omni-Experience in Digital Banking

  • Decreased support tickets related to navigation and transaction errors

Problem and Business Context

Broadway Bank’s legacy platform Architect (seen above) had accumulated years of customization, resulting in:

  • Inconsistent navigation

  • Confusing task flows

  • Poor mobile usability

  • High support volume


This created three business risks:

  1. Customer churn driven by failed financial actions

  2. Rising operational cost from usability-related support tickets

  3. Limited scalability of the platform for future institutions

The redesign required a careful tradeoff between modernizing the experience and preserving existing customer behavior to avoid short-term disruption.

Solution and Tradeoffs

Several critical tradeoffs shaped the solution:


Tradeoff 1: Flexibility vs. Clarity

Support logs showed most failures occurred in basic tasks, not advanced features.

Decision:
We chose clarity over deep configurability.

Outcome:
Users could locate and complete key actions faster, with fewer errors.


Tradeoff 2: Visual refresh vs. interaction consistency

A purely visual update would not address the root cause of confusion.

Decision:
We prioritized interaction consistency across flows rather than stylistic novelty.

Outcome:
User behavior became more predictable, reducing hesitation during financial actions.


Tradeoff 3: Mobile-first patterns vs. legacy desktop behavior

Optimizing solely for mobile risked breaking learned desktop habits.

Decision:
We designed a shared interaction model across devices.

Outcome:
Adoption improved without increasing support volume from existing customers.


What we intentionally did NOT build

To support these tradeoffs, we deprioritized:

  • Advanced personalization

  • Highly modular dashboards

  • Experimental navigation

The outcome of this constraint was a simpler, more learnable system.

Research and Risk Mitigation

Research was used to reduce decision risk, not to prove perfection.

This included:

  • User Personas

  • Forrester Benchmark Report

  • App Store reviews

  • Customer support logs

  • Engineering and platform constraints

Key insight:

Frustration stemmed less from outdated visuals and more from uncertainty during financial actions (e.g., “Did my transfer succeed?”).

This reframed the problem from:
“modernize UI” → “reduce ambiguity in high-risk actions.”

The outcome of this reframing was a focus on task success over cosmetic change.

Design Strategy

We focused design effort on the highest-impact flows:

  • Transfers

  • Bill payments

  • Account overview

  • Card controls

Key decisions included:

  • Shifting from feature-based to task-based navigation

  • Elevating balances, recent activity, and next actions

  • Introducing clearer confirmation and error states

Each change was evaluated based on its outcome:
Could users complete financial actions with less hesitation and fewer errors?

Leadership and Collaboration

I worked cross-functionally with:

  • Product management

  • Engineering

  • Broadway Bank VP client stakeholders

  • Internal platform teams

My contributions included:

  • Aligning multiple engineering teams around shared interaction patterns

  • Advocating for usability improvements over legacy customizations

  • Mentoring 2 junior designers contributing to the design system

Outcome:
Design patterns became reusable platform assets rather than one-off solutions.

Reflection

This project reinforced that strong financial UX is built on intentional tradeoffs.

Key lessons:

  • Clarity often outperforms flexibility

  • Trust is shaped by feedback and predictability

  • Design impact is best measured by operational outcomes

If I repeated this project, I would:

  • Instrument task success earlier

  • Validate navigation tradeoffs with faster experiments

Press Links

Broadway Bank wins 2020 IDC Omni-Experience Award for Digital Banking by Broadway Bank

Fiserv Named Overall Real Results Winner by Business Wire