Achieving Design Coherence

This presentation showcases how I am working to create design coherence across multiple, previously silo-ed platforms as Art Director over the last two years for the Wells Fargo digital sales experience. 

I continue to combined my focus areas expertise in experience direction, art direction, strategy, and management and work with designers, developers, product management, brand specialist, and corporate executives to unify the design for the customer facing experience. 

Due to confidentiality, the most sketches in this document represent high-level visuals of the designs currently in development. 

Overview

As recently as 2016 the digital customer experience suffered from disjointed design systems and dated interaction. Over the last two I have focused my efforts on unifying the Brand expression and bridging the gaps of the customer flow. This includes: 

• Intricately crafting digital brand foundation guidance
• Creating new, top to bottom, scalable design systems across multiple platforms
• Continuously partnering with our Customer Insights (usability), Technology, Product Management, and Executive Leadership teams for critical support.

Homepage Overview (shop)

One of my main projects of 2017 was redesigning the wellsfargo.com homepage. As art director and project lead, I solved for immediate customer needs, strategic business goals, and a visual design that strongly positioned the Brand as an industry leader and supportive partner. Tasks and outcomes included:

• Competitive analysis and deep insights to customer behavior on existing page
• Extensive testing program including a benchmarking study with four distinct design directions, approximately 1,800 participants, and consisted of a series of questions, A/B selections and a visual heat map with verbatim feedback
• New design produced an increased marketing engagement by 153% and improved page load time by 12%

Focus areas

• Experience Direction: performance solutions, extensive user research and testing, personalization plan
• Art Direction: multiple design iterations and refinement, brand and marketing integration, image and color strategy  
• Strategy: creation of customer and business goals, feedback and planning workshop, marketing considerations, socialization 
• Management: project lead planning, team resourcing

Overview

With the redesign of the homepage, the continuing evolution of the Service experience, and the upcoming platform redesigns for Buying and Fulfillment, it became increasingly necessary to create overarching guidance for foundational digital brand expressions. This initiative overlapped with the Buy Transformation work (covered on the next page). My efforts included (but were not limited to): 

• Identifying the required global elements, optional elements, UX colors and patterns
• Actively applying and testing guidance to live designs, and feeding new design work back to be included in requirements
• Reviewed and provided feedback for refinements and considerations

Buying Experience Overview (Buy)

Focusing on applications for all of WF digital products, this is transforming the entire customer flow by simplifying the experience dramatically, serving as a leading example of new digital brand direction, and implementing features making it much easier for customers to apply for products. Tasks included:

• Three day “protothon” with partners from diverse disciplines to examine the existing experience and identify actionable concepts that could result in positive transformation for the user and the business
• Comprehensive look at design, interaction and content of 17 product applications with customer and business goals in mind, taking into account other projects usability testing, customer feedback, accessibility and technical constraints
• Full accessibility usability on new form design and interaction requiring close partnership with development

Key Tasks

• Experience Direction: created application best practices, extensive customer testing plan, new feature implementation 
• Art Direction: established color strategy with limited color palette, applied brand fonts, created new form interaction
• and design
• Strategy: building and maintaining new design system for scalable use
• Management: connection points for multiple projects to use new system, established and supported design SME

Fulfillment Overview (fulfill)

The Fulfillment space serves as a critical bridge between customers acquiring products and WF servicing those products. It allows for essential communication and guidance on digitally reviewing, uploading and signing material. Tasks included: 

• Conducted a “design shootout” with lead visual designers to kick-start design explorations
• Overall modernization including design alignment, increased scan-ability, voice and tone update, personalized updates and guidance, task focused design with progress indicators
• Solutions for task model needs of understanding where customers are in the process, know what’s next, completing required tasks, and finding helpful information and communication

Focus areas

• Experience Direction: task model alignment, required tasks services, dynamic dashboard, extensive usability plan
• Art Direction: interpret Digital Brand Foundation guidance, leverage shared libraries from Buy experience, transitional design into Service experience
• Strategy: Building and maintaining new design system for scalable use
• Management: Connection points for multiple projects to use this design, established and supported design SME

Onboarding Experience Overview (Onboard)

An often overlooked space within the customer journey is the point of onboarding where essential package communication, account creation, and activation (among other tasks) occurs. Our recent project kickoff has initiated strategic planning, leadership sponsorship, and in depth experience research. Our goals include executing against three work streams: 

• Identify and solve for near term common flows
• Conceptualize long term vision work for future banking experience 
• Continued ideation, prototyping, validating and road mapping for project integration

Before and After

WellsFargo.com Homepage Redesign

Category: digital, website homepage, product design, ux/ui design, research, strategy

Role: project lead, art and experience director, customer testing, strategy and project prioritization

Project Summary: As project lead, art director and designer for Wells Fargo's Digital Experience team for five years, I managed and redesigned their main homepage that receives more than three million views each day from customers and prospects. When we began the project, the bank’s homepage had not been designed for four years. We entered this project by focusing on the needs of our customers, while keeping the company’s specific business goals and principles in mind. Throughout the makeover, my team and I iterated on more than nine design directions, gathered feedback from nearly 2,000 participants, and worked closely with eight different project teams. The final design has produced an increased marketing engagement by 153% and an improved page load time of 12%.

(Some material has been masked due to confidentiality.)

Research

I began by learning as much as I could about the current page using comScore analysis to understand how it was performing, what customers were looking for and to see who was doing it better. I also conducted independent competitive analysis at an international scale.

Strategic Partnership

My close relationship with the digital marketing team allowed me to iterate on some early ideas and directives coming out of that group. In addition interviewing our customers, we also spoke with business partners to clearly identify their “must have” needs, creating a transparent and supportive relationship.

Design strategy

After identifying our customer and business needs, design and strategic objectives, and brand perspective, I evolved two earlier ideas into four distinct directions, which incorporated marketing angles and our custom customer personas.

Customer Testing

I leveraged every customer insights tool in our tool belt for this phase of the project. It started (and continued throughout the project) with internal “open houses” that included guided reviews, online surveys and comment cards. Our most illuminating test was a benchmarking study that we applied to four distinct design directions with approximately 1,800 participants. This study consisted of a series of questions, A/B selections and a visual heat map with verbatim feedback. As refinements continued, my team and I conducted a series of qualitative studies that helped us narrow in on specific choices.

Refinement

Armed with robust customer insights and facing a fast-approaching timeline, the next steps of consolidation, refinement, and buy-in became critical. I created and conducted a two-day workshop with our digital project partners to narrow down our direction based on the extensive customer feedback we had received. By realigning our preferences and staying focused on our objectives, I could quickly refine our design approach: consolidating four directions into two, then into one final direction.

Results

When the broader design phase was completed, I focused on fine-tuning all of the important details, including the final content and imagery, personalization, interactions, load time, official documentation, and QA. The end-result is a fresh homepage that proudly represents the modern-day brand, more efficiently provides customers with the information they’re looking for, and supports the growth of the business. The redesign has led to significant results: increased marketing engagement by 153% and an improved page load time of 12%

BOOK CASE STUDY  |  MAGAZINE CASE STUDY

Want to see more?

Email me at akar123@gmail.com for more details.