A New Approach to Banking

Wells Fargo conducted extensive research to understand the needs of people struggling with day-to-day money management. We had in-depth conversations where we learned that people work hard to stay on top of their finances. But they want an easier way – and some helpful tools – to set money aside, pay bills, and manage their spending.

In the extensive research we undertook, we were impressed and humbled by the various life hacks that many people created on their own to help them manage money. They used notes apps and calendar reminders for key bills. Some of them used prepaid cards and multiple bank accounts to separate money from spending. When we showed the Greenhouse experience to these customers, they had an immediate, positive response to seeing everything all in one place.

Using Greenhouse means having two accounts:
Set Aside Account – where you deposit your money and set it aside to pay specific bills.
Spending Account – your day-to-day spending account that is linked to a debit card. This is the primary account for ATM access and purchases.

The Greenhouse effort was a partnership between several divisions of Wells Fargo and we were encouraged to push the envelope on how banking could work.

I was the lead interaction designer on this effort with a focus on integrating the various customer journeys into one seamless experience. I focused on the main landing page, app navigation, key transactions and global settings.

The illustration above are key screens from the “I want to” navigation. Instead of the traditional “Hamburger” menu that is in the upper corner of most apps, we developed a natural language navigation that took the user directly to the desired location based on keywords. As the user began to type, popular results were presented and as the user continued to type, we displayed more accurate results.

This solution received several rounds of user testing and prototyping and continues to improve as more user data is collected.

Below is the screen flow that was delivered to engineering.