Redesigning Commercial Electronic Office Portal and Lending Platform
OVERVIEW
Wells Fargo is a global financial services firm offering banking, investment, and mortgage services. It provides diverse financial products to individuals, businesses, and institutions. As a major player in the U.S., it offers personal banking and wealth management alongside commercial services.
ROLE & DURATION
Lead Product Designer
Create designs focusing on customer-centric and journey-centric approaches. Develop strategies based on user personas and prioritize accessibility in design. Address limitations within the Pioneer Design Framework, adopt Micro Front Ends in design, conduct ongoing user research, and manage product execution and rollout.
May 2019 - Feb 2020
TEAM
With our squad Myself, Junior designer, Product Manager, User Researcher, Content Strategist, Accessibility Consultant, Front-end engineers and QA
Including the CEO Portal design Team (14 Designers). Weekly design reviews, Knowledge sharing sessions
ABOUT THE PRODUCT
Wells Fargo Commercial customers use all their commercial B2B products through the Commercial Electronic Office (CEO) for their banking needs. The CEO portal is the gateway to all access all the B2B products.
GOAL
Commercial Electronic Office (CEO) Portal requires enhancements of the dashboard and products across multiple journeys representing our clients' product portfolios and unique relationships with our bank. The products that require enhancements are CEO Portal, Lending and Money Movement.
Lending Management is a B2B product in the CEO portal that will allow customers to view and manage Wells Fargo loans, letters of credit and certain other obligations.
Who are the users and what do they do?
Commercial banking customers
Commercial banking customers typically include businesses, corporations, partnerships, and institutions rather than individual consumers. These customers often require specialized financial services such as loans, lines of credit, cash management, trade finance, and other corporate banking solutions to support their business operations and growth. Commercial banking customers vary widely in size, from small businesses to large corporations.
PROCESS
Following the Double Diamond design model we developed a custom plan which is divided into three stages:
Discover & Define
Design
Validate & Evolve
Discover & Define
Research, understand, uncover pain points, insights, formulate a hypothesis.
User Personas
I collaborated with the User Research team to identify CEO Portal and Lending product users in Commercial Banking. We outlined 11 unique profiles spanning various industries, revenue ranges, segments, and roles. We use these personas as empathy anchors to find the customer's financial needs and interests based on role, demographic and behavioral dimensions.
User Research
Before diving in, we took a step back to comprehend the issues from the end user's perspective. Opting for a qualitative research approach and leveraging our familiarity with personas, we aimed to pinpoint pain points and understand how the redesign could enhance their experiences. The user research team, along with stakeholders, collaborated on research plans, formulated effective user research questions, and conducted internal interviews to align goals and ensure study success. The objective of this usability analysis is to grasp customer priorities, assess how digital capabilities can aid them, evaluate design concepts, and identify potential enhancements or additions for our users.
12
INTERVIEW SESSIONS
720
RECORDING MINS
20+
INSIGHTS
CEO Home
Lending Management Home
Lending Management - Facility Details
Lending Management - Payments
Key Findings
CEO Portal
1
Most of the customers looks for customization capability, unliked the feedback on content of the tiles across top.
2
Many of them wanted to adjust their view based on role.
3
Many customers would miss the left navigation with links to products and services.
4
The majority of customers found the navigation between applications less intuitive, requiring numerous steps to launch and accomplish tasks.
5
Some participants noted that the commercial site lacks usability compared to the consumer site, resulting in a notably different experience.
6
Many customers felt the portal would be ease for core CEO and difficult for new ones.
Lending Management
1
Customers felt like the page is cluttered with lot of information, difficult to navigate
2
The balance information is not clear enough to manage loans.
3
Many features were hidden inside the navigation.
4
Difficult to understand the context of deep links.
5
Dashboard is not interactive and intuitive.
6
Many customers felt like they need switch to a different product to view their cash account balances.
7
Provide more proactive notifications when action is required for renewals.
8
Many customers felt like the usability should be improved when they compare the business with competitive markets.
“Its not easy to switch between my credit accounts and felt like managing credit facilities and loans at different places”
"
Treasury Analyst, Computer Hardware & Software
“I feel like you need to click on a lot more screens in Lending Management to gather all the info needed”
"
CFO, Apparel Manufacturing
“It is difficult to filter the best rate availability. I need to advance funds always for lower interest rate”
"
Director of Finance, Aerospace Mfg
“I want to pick the loan for down payment that benefits me financially ”
"
Accounting manager, Real Estate Investment
“What do you mean by facility name, facility number? The facility part throws me off, because properties are called facilities in CRE mortgages”
"
CEO & President, Plastic Films Manufacturing
Ideate and Visualize the solutions which can be validated and iterated.
Design
Redefine User Flow Diagram
Revamping the user flows for the CEO portal and lending journey to identify necessary features, allocate user needs, and visualize the objective of this significant transformation. Integrated user feedback to streamline task completion.
Current Experience
CEO Home
Lending Management Home
Lending Management - Facility Details
Lending Management - Payments
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New User Flow
CEO Portal
Lending
Leveraging a New Design Experience
For enriching the portal experience, setting up a foundation for our product, business, technology teams to deliver scalable, personalized, targeted, journey based experiences for our clients leveraging the Micro Frontend (MFE) Infrastructure.
Micro Frontends allows us to build in small, reusable parts and presents widgets that offer a customizable UI and deliver personalization at sscale for our clients.
We built a....
New design system
New color palette
New dashboard
Payment widgets
Actionable tasks
Alerts
Entitlements driven top navigation
New Widgets & Components of CEO Portal Home
Manage all types of Accounts in one widget
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Top Navigation with access all products and services
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Summary of key tasks and notifications
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Payments and Transfers
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New CEO Portal Homescreen
A user-centric and journey-centric dashboard is the core idea of portal transformation.
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Key Improvements
- Enriched the dashboard experience to single page application composed of Micro front-end
- Context, customer centric and journey centric
- From disjointed multiple applications to Succinct customer experience
- A revamped top CEO navigation for user to access all their products and services
- Customers can access all their enrolled features in a single page.
- View and manage cash & credit accounts in a single widget
- View summary of key tasks and notifications in home page and take actions if required
- Customers can customize their dashboard view using preferences
- Customers can make different type of payments and transfers in home page
Scalability and Personalization is the key of Lending journey transformation
Lending Home
Selecting Payment Account
Review Information
Confirmation
Key Improvements
1
Enriched the lending dashboard experience into single page application composed of Micro front-ends.
2
Ability to view credit accounts, and loan balances. Manage Advance cash funds, Pay down on principal & check loan rate maturity status.
3
Deep links to access more information
4
Customized credit accounts based on user behavior.
7
Grouping the credit accounts based on the account type.
5
Financially benefitting customers by paying down principal for loans with higher interest rates.
8
Simplified the business terminologies for new users which would be easy to understand.
6
Financially benefitting customers by advancing cash funds for loans with lower interest rates.
9
Progressive display of payment and transfer requests, to clearly communicate the users on what step of payment they are in.
Manage Advance cash funds, Pay down on principal
Grouping the credit accounts
Organized credit account and loan information
Handling application feedback messaging conditions
Feedback messaging in MFEs
Feedback messaging in overlays
Validate & Evolve
Test, measure the results, constantly monitor and improve.
Feedback from Business stakeholders
I conducted multiple design walk-throughs during our weekly critiques, gathering feedback from internal design members, leaders, engineers, and various product teams. The received feedback was excellent, and the business team, particularly appreciated the new lending platform redesign. Additionally, we shared the designs with some actual users who expressed their enthusiasm and found the changes beneficial for their daily use.
The next phase involves the development team taking over the design for implementation. They'll review it, estimate the required development efforts, and proceed with the sprints.
50 %
Reduced CEO Service, training & compliant calls
80 %
Reduced Manual Service requests
10 %
Increased CEO adoption and usage
99.9 %
Increased CEO Portal availability/uptime
100% compliance with ADA, regulatory, enterprise & and CEO Standards. 100% resolution of risk issues
“Almost 677K users accessing the new portal, resulting in over
4.9M Sessions in a month”
“The lending starts providing digital services to 200,000+ customers with $450 Billion outstanding loan balances generating ~$11 Billion revenues per annum.”