US Bank

U.S. Bank's digital investing products run under FINRA rules, so every screen carries a legal obligation on top of whatever the customer is actually trying to do with their money.

I joined U.S. Bancorp Investments in 2021 as senior product designer on Automated Investor, the bank's robo-advisory platform. Drop-off data showed where people were leaving. Research interviews explained why. Customers knew they wanted to invest and could not tell what the product was asking them to do.

Project 1: Automated Investor Journey

Small effort. Big results. Approachable for everyone.

The problem

Onboarding asked customers to interpret financial jargon, complete steps that had no visible relationship to each other, and accept regulatory disclosures with no explanation of what they covered. Drop-off spiked at each of those points.

My approach

I started from how people describe their own money rather than from how the products are legally structured, and journey mapping and prototyping kept landing in the same place: the flow needed to work like a conversation and was built like a stack of forms.

Three decisions drove the redesign. Show only what the next decision requires, so complexity arrives in sequence instead of all at once. Open with the goal, which is a house or retirement or a child's education, and introduce the mechanics after that. Rewrite every disclosure in plain language, on the argument that a disclosure customers understand does more for confidence than one they scroll past.

The wireframe below is the full system before any visual design. It runs from goal-setting into financial mechanics and never the other direction, and that order was the thing I spent eighteen months defending.

The experience

An Insight Card puts relevant context inside the customer's existing account view, so the flow starts without a redirect. Goal Page, Goal Setup, and Risk Quiz follow: name the goal, set a target amount and a date, then answer three plain-language questions about risk.

Market Simulation gives customers a slider and shows how contribution changes move the projection. Investment Mix shows where the money actually goes. Apply Flow opens an Individual Advisory Account in under ten minutes.

Project 2: Shop & Browse

Answering the needs of the emergent affluent crowd.

Shop & Browse is where customers look at credit cards, investment products, and financial tools.

The audience

Research and account data surfaced a growing segment the bank called the emergent affluent: digitally native professionals with rising income whose expectations came from consumer apps rather than from banks. They wanted personalization and speed, and Shop & Browse was a flat catalog.

My approach

I designed for that segment while keeping the surface usable for every other one, which meant competitive analysis, segmentation work, and a long stretch with product strategy and engineering working out what premium could mean inside an existing design system and a regulated environment.

The redesign presents products through how people use them instead of through feature lists, surfaces them against life events and stated goals, and raises the photography direction and type treatment without leaving the brand. It also added research-backed components to the U.S. Bank design system so the same treatment could carry into later campaigns.

Impact

Automated Investor

• Championed the design strategy from an 800-person design org up to a 12-person executive team, working stakeholder dissent down to a decision.

• 35% reduction in onboarding time, with completion up across mobile and web.

• 25% conversion lift from simplified risk profiling and sequenced disclosure.

• 20% increase in reported user satisfaction post-launch.

• 30% improvement in cross-functional efficiency through a shared component system.

Shop & Browse

• +30% increase in product exploration and application starts.

• +22% brand uplift among the emergent affluent audience.

• New research-backed components added to the design system.

Reflection

The design was not the hard part. Eighteen months of alignment came before anything shipped. Legal, compliance, product, and the executive team each held a real position, and a design that customers like but that cannot survive review does not go out the door. I ended up treating every one of those conversations as its own problem: find the constraint, then find the sentence that makes a customer need read as a business need.

There was a faster version of this. Bury the disclosures, make the risk quiz optional, cut the investment mix down to a single recommendation. Each one was defensible on its own. Together they would have shipped a product nobody had a reason to trust.