The situation
U.S. Bank asked me to be the experience architect for its consumer mortgage stream, a whole division of the bank. The mortgage experience ran across entry pages, rates pages, calculators, and guided selling.
What I did
- Managed a team of six to seven: a researcher, two designers, a content strategist, and a product owner.
- Mapped the full mortgage sales funnel on one board: entry points, guided selling, state rates pages, calculators, and conversion.
- Mapped every current rates page and the paths between them before changing anything, then drew the proposed flow with the call-to-action order called out.
- Designed the first-time homebuyer architecture: triage, product comparison, and the content library.
- Worked in the bank's user labs and with customer advocacy groups, and took what we learned straight into planning with the business.
- Designed with the accessibility team and content designers on every release, as the bank required.
- Wrote research plans, ran prototype testing, and brought SEO into the UX decisions.
What changed
It was brutal. Mortgage is an education-heavy sale, and the funnel ran through entry pages, state rates pages, calculators, and guided selling, each owned by someone different. The bank's digital optimization and testing teams ran rigorous reports against our work, and they showed a consistent uptick: better search performance, more qualified leads reaching the mortgage desk, and every tracked metric up between 5% and 45%.
What it says about working with me
I can walk into a large regulated company, map the whole customer path, and lead the team that fixes it.
