Eastern Bank, the largest regional bank in Massachusetts, was pivoting to a digital-first future. However, the 'off-the-shelf' platform they adopted was visually outdated and glitchy. The result was a financial bleed where an estimated 1,200 customers left every month due to the poor user experience design, putting millions of dollars in future revenue at risk. This instability also paralyzed our ability to scale; with only 20% of our 700,000 customers active online, the broken platform made it impossible to migrate the "Offline Majority" away from expensive branch transactions.

To address this issue, I was hired as the Product Design Lead to establish and lead a six-person design team. My team’s goal was to redesign and launch a new user experience for desktop and mobile banking for the consumer and small business segments, sitting on top of the existing bank backend.

The core problem was not the platform's technical capabilities, but its usability. Users were unaware that key features existed, got lost in confusing steps, and distrusted the outdated visual design.

Within my first week, I initiated a hiring strategy aligned with our roadmap, staffing designers to own specific features. To orchestrate these parallel efforts, I established a shared design system to unify the current platform and scale to future products. I enforced this alignment through weekly design critiques and daily standups.

My audit revealed a platform that looked a decade behind, stitched together with disjointed third-party applications. The cluttered layout forced users to hunt for basic features, while significant accessibility gaps exposed the bank to legal liability. This inconsistency is dangerous—it makes customers wonder, "If the platform is neglected, will it make mistakes with my money?"

To validate our internal metrics, we partnered with Bentley University for an external audit. The results were alarming with a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of -27 for Desktop and -75 for Mobile. This independent data confirmed the platform’s design was a critical business failure.

Customer Support reported that 30% of help desk calls were driven purely by UI confusion. Additionally, Branch Operations noted that 40% of in-person visits were for routine transactions that customers could have easily completed online.

I believed that the individual features were not broken but simply disjointed. My hypothesis was that the solution was not to rebuild the tools but to build a design system around them. To secure stakeholder buy-in, I prioritized rapid validation, bringing customers in immediately to test features. This early success built trust with leadership, authorizing us to scale the project from Consumer web to Mobile and Small Business.

Eastern Bank faced pressure from two sides: giants like Bank of America with massive scale, and agile FinTech startups with zero overhead. With physical branches becoming a financial liability, the bank had to pivot to a digital-first strategy. To rebuild our system, we hand-picked the strongest features from both competitors to create a modern hybrid platform.

With more than a decade of experience designing UX forms, I applied five proven solutions to achieve the highest impact. I prioritized the process by addressing low-effort, high-effort, and finally the “long-effort” solutions.

I operationalized alignment by adapting the studio critique model from my background at RISD. Beyond standard Daily Standups, I facilitated Team Critiques to expose blind spots that even Senior Designers miss in their own work. This process provided total visibility and allowed the team to see exactly what everyone else was building in real-time. It proved to be a high-ROI process. For a minimal time investment, we eliminated redundant work and ensured that the platform felt cohesive rather than a collection of siloed features.