Simplifying Valley's business online banking to improve wayfinding

I aligned the team of UX writers, designers, and researchers on what we needed to learn before making any design decisions.

1. ‍Stakeholder Alignment: My team met with internal stakeholders to decode the intent behind existing menu labels. Terms like "Positive Pay" carried meaning internally but landed as jargon externally. Closing that gap was a prerequisite to any structural or naming decisions.‍
2. Usage Data: I set the direction to make informed decisions, pulling analytics to identify the top 20% of tasks business customers perform 80% of the time. That guided the hierarchy that the navigation needed to reflect.‍
3. Competitive Analysis: I directed the team to conduct a comparative navigation audit across Chase, Citi, Bank of America, Capital One, SoFi, U.S. Bank, and Truist.

Across all seven institutions, three patterns held:

• Navigation used task-based language rather than internal product naming.
• Fraud management and user controls were visible at the top level.
• Features were organized around customer intent, not internal systems.

These findings drew a clear contrast with Valley's existing experience. With a clear point of view on where the gaps were and what the industry standard was, I set the strategic direction for design and usability testing.

Armed with competitive benchmarks and behavioral data, I led the team in developing a new information architecture taxonomy — the strategic foundation for a two-round card sort and a tree test conducted with a low-fidelity prototype.

Test participants were recruited from our target population: active business owners. Their mental models, not internal assumptions, shaped what came next.

View prototype 1 >‍

New discoveries with Q2 changed the scope. Unknown features and role-based navigation emerged, unaccounted for in the prototype. We also learned that Q2 enables customizable landing pages—category hubs that can reduce reliance on deep menu structures entirely.

I guided the team to revise the prototype with four new hypotheses based on these capabilities.

• Feature visibility: Surfacing high-value features earlier in the experience would reduce the effort required to find critical tools.
• Top-level simplicity: Reducing the number of primary navigation items would eliminate the excessive scrolling caused by deep nesting.
• Intent-based grouping: Organizing features around primary business goals rather than product categories would improve scannability and reduce cognitive load.
• In-context guidance: Embedding on-screen content within landing pages would orient users without requiring them to explore blindly.

View prototype 2 >

Following the incorporation of additional role-based navigation items, I directed the team to run a second round of usability testing with both general population participants and Valley small business owners across varying levels of platform experience.

The general population outperformed Valley customers in overall task success ,consistent with our hypothesis that broader banking experience and more complex business needs translate into stronger navigation intuition.

Locating Assign User Roles

Valley customers gravitated toward Settings, but only a fraction completed the task successfully, landing instead in unrelated sections.

Recommendation: Retain the Settings placement, but surface User Roles more prominently and reorganize the section to prioritize critical business controls.

Locating Wire Payment Statuses

Most testers across both groups chose Wire & ACH Payments over Transaction Activity, but esoteric terminology created confusion.

Recommendation: Rename navigation items to reflect user intent, clarify the distinction between payment creation and transaction history, and duplicate key access points to reduce dead ends.

Locating Positive Pay

Both groups recognized Positive Pay as a service, not a setting. Yet, most looked for it in Settings anyway.

Recommendation: Relocate Positive Pay to Pay & Transfer under a dedicated Fraud Services section, and conduct follow-up research to align labeling with industry standards.

Before advancing to a third round of testing, I directed my research to conduct a targeted competitive analysis to resolve the Positive Pay placement problem. The research examined how leading financial institutions label and surface fraud-prevention tools in their navigation.

The finding was consistent:

Most institutions treat fraud management as a distinct service category, not a buried setting, and use plain-language labels that signal protection rather than product names.

Final Usability Testing

Armed with that context, the team updated the prototype and ran a final validation. The results were decisive on two of three tasks:

• Locating Assign User Roles: The redesigned placement drove a 100% task success rate, a 43% improvement over baseline. Surfacing business and user settings higher in the hierarchy made the difference.
• Locating Wire Payment Statuses: Clearer labeling and section restructuring produced a 100% task success rate, a 72% improvement. Renaming to reflect user intent eliminated the ambiguity that had caused friction.
• Locating Positive Pay success reached 64%. Both groups still found it the most difficult. Testers continued navigating toward Pay & Transfer first. Rather than forcing a pattern, the recommendation was to meet customers where they are: keep Positive Pay in both Pay & Transfer and Services to avoid relying on one path.