Bank of America

I have completed two contracts with Bank of America. One in their cybersecurity division and another in their wholesale division.

Cybersecurity

I spent two years in Bank of America’s Global Information Security (GIS) working on internal cybersecurity projects. My role was as their sole UX designer and user researcher. Most of my work was early project work, or as I like to call it UX Scouting.

Due to the sensitive nature of my interviews (and the fact that none of my team was located locally), I worked remote during this contract.

Methodology

For each new project I was assigned, I met with the stakeholders before the work started to determine the scope and their KPIs for the effort.

I followed up by performing contextual research interviews with the team’s end users to find out how they performed the project-related processes either with current applications or manually (in some cases). In many cases, I was able to surface many unresolved software defects as well as usability issues that impacted the team’s efficiency.

My last step was to create new designs based on the stakeholders’ project and my research that improved the usability software and efficiency of the team.

Projects

All projects were related to risk assessment—both internal and external.

  • Risk Event Form: I overhauled the input form to be less overwhelming to the end-user and provide the most relevant information to the team that received and processed the resulting tickets.
  • Ticket Assignment: Through contextual interviews on a manual assignment process, I was able to design a system that automated their business logic and provided more efficient distribution of the high-priority job tickets.
  • Big Data: This is where I spent most of my time. There were multiple projects for a variety of security teams but they all had the same need. They wanted to take massive amounts of data and slice and dice it to bubble up risk and drill down to the details. The trick was to tailor the most relevant data for each team’s needs.

Wholesale

I spent eighteen months in Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Wholesale division working on both internal- and customer-facing projects. I was on a small interactive services team (IS). My role was a hybrid of both UX designer and user researcher.

Methodology

The IS team uses Design Thinking methodology for all their projects. It overlays nicely with Agile and prioritizes user research driven design.

The research interviews were conducted remotely via WebEx. I divided the research into three phases for simplicity: discovery, validation, and usability. Discovery research is about interviewing the users and understanding their workflows. Validation is meant to evaluate the design and IA artifacts that are derived from the discovery research. Validation research is usually iterative as the designs progress. Usability research always involves getting the user’s hands on a working code prototype to see if the team missed any deal breakers.

Design and IA artifacts were created using Omnigraffle and Sketch. We built a Sketch component library so that we could deliver pixel perfect specs to the dev teams.

Projects

  • Relationship Manager Digital Assistant:  Bank of America wanted to create an artificial intelligence (AI) mobile application, a “digital assistant,” for their relationship managers (RMs) to use when they’re out of the office on client/prospect meetings. Using discovery and validation research, I provided the client with the proper framing of the users’ needs to start this project off on the path to success. I was also the UX designer on this project.
    • Case Study (one page brief) available upon request
  • CashPro Sign-in and Landing Page Experience:  The new product owner wanted a fresh perspective on CashPro, a mature product used worldwide by @500k commercial users. Their goal was to improve the sign-in to landing page experience. My role was strictly research on this project.
    Using discovery and validation research, I found a previously unidentified user role which lead to an overly complex user interface.

    • Case Study (one page brief) available upon request
    • Research report (recreated from memory) is available upon request
  • Compliance Reporting:  Using discovery and validation research, I created the user interface and information architecture for an enterprise-wide compliance/regulatory application that increased efficiency by 10%.

Recommendations

“As one of the initial members of a newly formed UX competency in an enterprise organization, Jillian has proved to be an invaluable and effective team member and leader to drive research-based design and implementation.

“Her ability to mine user data from contextual and remote research and to turn it into effective design solutions in a quick and consistent manner has been one of our keys to success. As well her ability to team and share and absorb design concepts to strengthen the overall team competency was key in our ability to quickly grow and scale design at the enterprise level.

“Overall she has made a positive impact on our efforts to mature and enable our design and UX efforts, including her knowledge and contributions to our team efforts to solidify our operating model, to formalize our component designs, and her individual efforts to lead the design and UX tasks on projects.” — Matthew E. Carroll, Supervisor

“Jillian has all the traits of an excellent user researcher. She’s makes thoughtful observations, has the ability to analyze complex processes and provides organized documentation. Her sense of curiosity and passion to empathize with the user is what gives her the edge.” — Kristie Harrington-Isom, Co-worker

“Jillian has the rare combination of vast user research experience and great design acumen. Her ability to build relationships and willingness to share her experience makes her one of a kind. I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with her.” — Crystal Sundaramoorthy, Co-worker

Due to strict NDAs, I don’t have any of the original work that I did for the bank available for my portfolio.