The Brief
At JPMorgan Chase, I was brought in to design a greenfield digital mobile banking experience — a zero-to-one product with no prior design to reference, no existing patterns to inherit, and no shortcuts.
That kind of brief is rare. It's also unforgiving. Without a foundation to push against, every decision has to be made from first principles: what does a trustworthy banking app feel like? How do you balance simplicity with the density of financial information people actually need? Where does security UX end and friction begin?
"Starting from zero means there's nothing to hide behind. The decisions you make become the standard everything else is measured against."
The work demanded rigorous information architecture — mapping the full scope of banking interactions and designing a hierarchy that could support both first-time users and power users without compromise.
The Design
The foundation of the work was information architecture. Before any screen was designed, we mapped the full product surface — every task a user might need to complete, every object in the system, and the relationships between them. That map became the skeleton everything else was built on.
From there, the design focused on reducing cognitive load without dumbing things down. Mobile banking is inherently complex — but complexity doesn't have to feel complicated. The goal was clarity at every step: clear labels, clear states, clear next actions.
Interaction design was considered carefully throughout. A banking app carries real stakes — money, trust, security — and the UX has to communicate that without being anxiety-inducing. Microinteractions, loading states, and confirmation patterns all carry weight in this context.
Onboarding
Account overview
Transaction detail
What I Took Away
Designing from zero sharpens your thinking in ways that iteration work doesn't. You can't rely on convention — you have to understand why conventions exist before you decide whether to follow them or break them.
It also taught me a lot about the relationship between design and trust. In financial services, the experience IS the product. A confusing flow doesn't just frustrate — it erodes confidence in the institution. That's a high bar, and it makes the design work matter in a way that's hard to replicate in other contexts.