Turning a fragmented investing experience into one that works for seasoned investors and first-time digital investors alike.

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Overview

I led design for a multi-year effort to modernize U.S. Bank's investment platform. The existing experience felt fragmented: portfolio views were static snapshots, trade actions lived in separate tools outside the main dashboard, and navigation still reflected legacy systems that overwhelmed first-time investors. My job was to reimagine that journey end to end, building a Next Generation Investment Dashboard that could serve seasoned investors managing complex portfolios and everyday banking customers taking their first step into digital investing, on the same platform.

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Challenge

The bank's investment products had strong capabilities underneath, but customers couldn't easily get to them. Portfolio dashboards only showed limited snapshots, forcing people to dig for basic insights into their own holdings. Executing a trade meant multiple context switches between tools, which slowed decision-making at exactly the moment speed mattered. And the navigation patterns, inherited from legacy systems, added complexity that intimidated new investors before they'd even placed a trade.

None of that could be solved with a visual refresh alone. U.S. Bank operates in a highly regulated environment, so every design decision had to hold up against compliance, risk, and accessibility requirements at the same time it pushed the experience forward. That tension, between clarity, compliance, and innovation, shaped the entire process.

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Role & Approach

I worked closely with product managers, compliance officers, and engineers throughout, and the project moved through three phases.

Discovery and research. I ran workshops with compliance, risk, and investor relations teams to understand where the guardrails actually were, then interviewed users across experience levels, from first-time digital investors to people who'd been trading for decades, to find where the existing workflow broke down for each group. I also benchmarked competitor platforms to see where the market had already solved for personalization and accessibility, and where the gaps still were.

Design and prototyping. I built wireframes and moved through interactive prototypes to high-fidelity designs in Figma, mapping a trade execution flow that cut the distance between viewing a holding and confirming a trade down to just a few steps. AI-assisted insights were built into the experience to surface personalized account suggestions, but responsibly, without overwhelming the user or implying the platform was making decisions for them. Every screen was built against WCAG 2.1 AA standards from the start, not checked for accessibility after the fact.

Delivery and iteration. The team worked in Agile sprints, using Jira for task tracking and Confluence for documentation, with compliance and legal partners embedded directly in the process so safeguards were built into the user flows rather than bolted on afterward. I ran multiple rounds of moderated usability testing and refined the design against real satisfaction scores and drop-off data, not assumptions.

Solution

The final dashboard gave users real-time portfolio visualizations with customizable views, and folded trading directly into that view, so someone could go from checking their holdings to confirming a trade in a few clicks instead of switching tools. Compliance guardrails were built into the interface itself, so users always understood the boundaries they were operating within rather than discovering them after the fact. AI-powered insights were surfaced carefully, enough to build confidence without creating noise, and the whole experience was built to inclusive design standards so it held up equally well across very different levels of investing experience. What started as a dashboard redesign became the foundation U.S. Bank has continued building on for AI and modern UX across its digital wealth products.

Results

40% faster trade execution, from dashboard to confirmation · 91% satisfaction rate in usability testing, across mixed experience levels · 5,000+ early access users piloted the platform ahead of full rollout

 

Beyond the numbers, the project closed a lot of the distance between design, engineering, and compliance, which made every release after this one move faster.