About Zelle®
Zelle provides a unique way for individuals to send money directly between bank accounts. Easy-to-use and more secure than its competitors, Zelle has been adopted by over 27.4 million users who have collectively transferred over $94 billion dollars.
Over 500 financial institutions participate in the Zelle Network, integrating Zelle into their consumer applications.
Zelle’s Guidelines & Certification
To deliver a unified, outstanding experience to all customers, banks must adhere to Zelle's User Experience Guide.
Designers and product folks rely on this robust design system's interaction patterns, use cases, styles, and requirements—think Google Material Design or IBM Carbon Design System—to launch & update their bank's Zelle experience.
Participant banks are evaluated and certified by Zelle as they roll out new features—massive fines are on the line if they fail to get it right.
From Clunky to Interactive & Scalable
Today the guide exists as an unwieldy 180+ page PDF, published twice annually. It's difficult for participant banks to navigate, challenging for Zelle to maintain, and full of opportunities for improvement.
We did an information architecture overhaul and transformed the clunky PDF into a dynamic solution that's easy to navigate and scalable to grow alongside Zelle.
Planning for Success
Between October 2019 and March 2020, I worked on a team with one Product Manager and one Senior Designer to create an MVP design solution slated for launch in 2020. We worked closely with Zelle to determine project requirements and define how we would measure the success of our work.
I contributed to every phase of this project. My key individual contributions included:
Content Analysis
Content Strategy
Information Architecture
Interaction Pattern Design
Iterative Design
Responsive Design
Asset Creation
Who We’re Designing For
This is Zack, our user persona. As a lead designer at one of Zelle’s participating banks, he has a lot on his plate. Zack needs to meet the needs of his stakeholders and create great experiences for his users, all while ensuring that his designs meet Zelle’s requirements.
We created a user journey to track when and how Zack would need to use the guide. By designing for key touchstones during Zack’s journey, we were able to tailor the designs to his specific needs.
User-Centered Information Architecture
Understanding the current guide was crucial to creating an intuitve framework for the new site’s content. We wanted to capture important requirements and special edge cases, but also look for opportunities for improvement.
We identified the most basic requirements for certification, and used these as a guideline for organizing the rest of the content. By surfacing key requirements higher up in the site structure, we helped designers like Zack more easily scan the content to find what they need.
Navigation
To better align to Zack’s user journey and mental model, I separated the navigation into a primary section for in-depth informational content, and a secondary “utility” section that includes downloadable resources, certification guidelines, and revision history.
Checking deadlines, referencing revision history, and downloading resources are short tasks that Zack would repeat throughout his user journey. By comparison, he would spend longer periods of time exploring in-depth information about specific use case requirements, but would visit these requirements less frequently. Creating a visual separation between these types of tasks in the site navigation helps Zack get to what he needs more quickly.
A Solution That Scales
The digital user experience guide content is updated frequently in order to serve a rapidly evolving consumer landscape. We designed a solution that could capture the current requirements with enough flexibility to change and grow over time.
By focusing on repeatable elements and patterns, we created page templates and content outlines that could be applied across all content, creating a consistent experience for users and allowing Zelle to easily add and edit content.
User Feedback
Our team had assumed that the existing version of the guide contained too much repeated information, and as a result our early solutions focused on simplifying and reducing content. But user testing revealed that users wanted more detailed information and more explicit rules in certain areas of the guide.
Based on this feedback, we revised our sitemap to break content into more subsections in order to communicate extra details and nuances.
