Zelle is used in over 380 US bank’s mobile applications, has over 160 million users and transferred 187 Billion in 2019! + Over 3 trillion to date!
The Zelle FIUX* Design System
*Financial Institution User Experience
The Challenge
All FIs (Financial Institutions) have varied digital payment experiences, a variety of usability challenges to solve for and many different approaches to their payments and money movement experiences.
We set out to create a person-to-person payments ecosystem that had feature parity and a consistent Zelle brand experience across every FI within the Zelle network.
Within our design ecosystem we wanted to solve for flexibility that allowed a partner’s brand and their existing UX patterns to work together harmoniously while adhering to the documented Zelle UX guidelines to assure network consistency.
A massive challenge!
What We Did
Performed Foundational Research
We worked to leverage the expertise of our internal marketing intelligence team’s reports paired with a variety of external customer insight studies to gather current industry FI payment user patterns and needs.
My team also took the opportunity to embark on a complete 360 degree heuristic review of our top 7 bank’s payment implementations to further gather valuable data on how the current experiences are functioning in their production payment systems.
Engaged The Team And Listened
With the creation of a new internal UX research team, we reached out and partnered with 30 design leaders within the Zelle network across 20 FIs to create what is now known as the “Zelle FIUX Design Forum”. This forum helped provide an ongoing interactive and design focused conversation across our larger network to successfully inform our design decisions moving forward.
Built Prototypes, Tested, Shared And Evolved
In our 360 degree reviews and comprehensive design conversations with our network partners we quickly learned of many opportunities we had within our existing experience for improvement and we quickly acted on them.
As we progressed our design conversations, the Zelle UX team, continually shared our iterative usability testing results within our forum as the foundation for our ongoing design evolution.
The results spoke for themselves!
The Impact
Through our improved design inclusion and iterative approach to the evolution of the Zelle FIUX Design System, we were able publish and distribute vastly improved guidelines that eliminated many existing friction points and also solved for many new use cases.
Our April and October 2019 releases of the guidelines were quickly touted amongst our investors, partners and customers as a massive improvement in the overall user experience that has greatly increased our partner’s speed to market and their customer’s ability to quickly, easily and safely move money.
The impact of our efforts have been immense as the Zelle network moved 187 Billion dollars in 2019.
The end result is double digit growth for 2019!
