Brandon W. Mosley · Design Leader
Role UX Design Manager
Team Sr. UX Designer · Jr. UX Designers · UX Writer
Partners Product · UX Research · Engineering · QA
Deliverables High-fidelity
Tools Figma · Sketch · Illustrator · User Testing
Timeframe 1 month
Company In-house
Following a successful digital account opening launch, post-launch discovery surfaced three friction points undermining the experience for existing customers.
Partnering with product management, I led the design effort to diagnose and resolve each of these gaps, prioritizing experience quality and operational impact in equal measure.
High support call volume
Account review teams fielded a disproportionate call volume of complaints tied directly to Plaid funding issues.
Forced third-party funding
With no internal transfer option, 98.8% of customers linked existing accounts with Plaid, a third-party tool they didn't trust, and adding extra bank costs.
Lack of authentication
83.5% of existing customers arrived unauthenticated from online banking, unable to pre-fill information already on file — adding ~30 minutes data re-entry.
Reduce operational cost
Reduce third-party funding fees and back-office inquiries related to account funding issues.
Internal funding adoption
Increase usage of internal transfers for account funding and reduce reliance on third-party services.
Application completion time
Reduce the average time for existing customers to open a new account.
I designed three distinct concepts and partnered with UX Research to run unmoderated usability testing against each.
The findings validated the direction. Nearly all participants expected a sign-in entry point in the top-right navigation — a pattern consistent with my initial design instinct. A secondary finding surfaced user appetite for a new-vs.-existing customer prompt, which we noted and carried forward for later consideration.
Balancing user expectation against technical constraints, I made the call to anchor sign-in in the top-right and advance to production.
Post-launch analytics revealed an unexpected gap. Single sign-on adoption among existing customers dropped 15%, and 65% of existing customers were still funding accounts through Plaid rather than internal transfer, meaning Valley continued absorbing third-party fees.
The value of signing in wasn't clear enough at the point of entry. If customers didn't understand what they stood to gain, they had no reason to authenticate.
To pressure-test that assumption, I led a competitive analysis of how Ally, Wells Fargo, Citizens, and other financial institutions handled customer personas in their account opening platform.
The pattern was consistent across the board: each asked users to identify their relationship with the bank upfront, setting the expectation that existing customers would benefit from a pre-filled, streamlined application.
That insight reframed the design problem. Working outside the constraints of the out-of-the-box framework, I translated the research into three new design concepts aimed at surfacing the sign-in value proposition earlier in the flow.
A second round of usability testing produced a clear winner. Option C, the most visual approach, outperformed both alternatives on clarity, comprehension, and error rate.
With a defined direction and specific feedback in hand, I refined the design for production.
I owned the design end-to-end on this one. Working within a team that spanned Product, Engineering, QA, and UX Research, I produced the initial concepts, ran competitive analysis, and iterated through two rounds of usability testing to get the solution right.
The fix was targeted: surfacing the right entry point at the right moment so existing customers could open accounts faster and fund them internally. Small change, significant business impact.
-20 mins
Saved existing customers 20 minutes of re-entering information the bank already has on file.
$8.2K
Monthly savings from 83% of new online accounts funded with internal transfers.
92%
Existing users now able to authenticate directly from online banking to open new accounts.
Test, don't assume
Use competitor research to inform strategy, but validate hypotheses with robust testing to ensure business results.
Meet users where they are
Design around user behaviors and expectations to boost adoption and cut friction.
UX needs space to succeed
Meaningful outcomes come from investing in the UX process, including testing, surveys, and continuous customer feedback.
