UnityDesk
My role
UX/UI Design
Dev handoff
Design system management
Team
Interaction Design
Ted Meltok
Content Design
Allison Locke
Service Design
Devon Donald
Design Research
Claire Corbett
Timeframe
January 2024-Present
overview
Creating an integrated digital solution
In 2021, through an internal study Barcliff & Hunt identified inefficiencies in commercial banking due to fragmented systems, requiring colleagues to juggle multiple vendors, emails, and calls. To streamline operations and enhance competitiveness, the bank launched an integrated sales, onboarding, and lending solution built for seamless integration and future scalability.
As lead UX Visual Designer, I worked closely with UX to create high-fidelity interfaces, refining existing designs and developing new features to improve the user experience.
Login enhancements
Redesigned the login page to align with the new design system, improving usability and accessibility. Strengthened visual hierarchy through typography, spacing, and contrast, and clarified user actions by emphasizing CTAs and consolidating error recovery links.
Task management
The Task Page centralizes loan document management, reducing manual follow-ups and inefficiencies. With sorting and filtering options, customers can quickly find outstanding tasks, ensuring a smoother loan process while minimizing delays and workload for bank employees.
Stay Informed with notifications
Introduced real-time in-app and email notifications to surface key updates, reducing missed information, delays, and manual follow-ups while improving overall efficiency and engagement.
Design decisions
Research
The solution speaks first — Here’s how we got there
An internal study revealed that our commercial banking faced inefficiencies due to fragmented systems, requiring colleagues to rely on multiple vendors, emails, and calls. This caused delays, errors, and poor transparency, highlighting the need for an integrated solution to improve productivity and stay competitive.
Uncovering opportunities for Improvement
Based on our analysis of 200+ customer and colleague insights, we identified six recurring challenges. Through reimagination workshops, we uncovered four main areas of opportunity.
One of these opportunities—customer self-service—emerged from addressing challenges such as lack of transparency and disconnected digital platforms. By further exploring customer self-service, we identified three key objectives that, when addressed, would resolve the most common pain points experienced in the onboarding and lending journeys.
The three key objectives
Enhancing Security
Resolve authentication challenges and improve the onboarding process.
Painpoints
Authentication & Onboarding Issues
Increasing Efficiency
Streamline document management and reduce manual work.
Painpoints
No Online Credit Application
Inefficient Document Management & Storage
Manual & Time-Consuming Customer Requests
Improving communication
Streamline and automate customer interactions to minimize manual requests.
Painpoints
Customer Communication Barriers
Reimagining the problem
With our needs and pain points identified, we asked: how might we design a solution that mitigates these issues, meets user needs, and aligns with business goals?
A design concept emerged: a digital self-service platform for managing confidential documents, accelerating loan processing efficiently
DEVELOPMENT & VALIDATION
Developing the designs
After creating high fidelity mockups I create development files allowing our designs to be inspected by our developers to transfer design to code.
I work closely with our developers during this phase to make sure their work is matching our designs and that the interactions are correct.
Validating Designs
Applied an Agile UX process by designing with proven patterns, testing with users, and iterating on research insights. User testing revealed confusion around message archiving, leading to the introduction of a “hide” option to manage inboxes without deleting messages due to scope.
Project takeaways
Learning when to use existing components vs creating new ones. Balancing design system use with creating new components saves time and improves UX. Expanding existing components is often preferable but knowing when to create something new and working with teams to get that process going is important.
Review the designs with developers. Creating mockups and sending them to be developed is not the end of the process. Reviewing designs with developers ensures accurate implementation, catches inconsistencies early, and prevents costly rework.