Bank of America Enterprise Project

Context

At Bank of America, the enterprise experience design team (EXD) provides UX services to internal “clients” across the organization who are building new software for enterprise and back office functions.

At the start of 2024, EXD acquired a new “client” looking for UX expertise as they embarked on a massive software development project to replace decades old software for a vital business function. The client had multiple failed attempts in the past to get this project off the ground, which built up skepticism and doubt among the stakeholders and users in any possibility of success this time around.

Given their skepticism and low knowledge of UX practices, I wanted to use my Discovery Phase research to give the best first impression I could to demonstrate the maximum impact UX can have in a software development project and build a strong positive working relationship from day one.

Methodology

Due to the tenuous history of this project, our stakeholders wanted to keep information within a small group of people and limited my access to who I could talk to about the project. Nonetheless, I was able to reach out to ten users and stakeholders in the US, UK, and Asia offices to walk me through their current processes in the old platform and talk through their current pain points.

Every person I talked to was more than eager to show me all the shortcomings of what they’ve been dealing with daily for the past five or so years, from long load times to a convoluted navigational path to their most basic functions.

From these contextual inquiries, I was able to create abbreviated profiles for each job role participating in the overall process. Each profile highlighted their unique goals, needs and pain points and were mapped into a combined journey map on a digital whiteboard.

Rather than a traditional presentation of insights, the research was presented as a key part of a collaborative kick-off workshop at the start of the project which defined the product goals, vision and roadmap. The whiteboard served as a helpful visual tool to allow tech executives, product owners, UX strategist, and user stakeholders to keep user needs in focus as they discussed various pieces of the software development project.

The impact of this research was so great, stakeholders continued to talk about it throughout the year as story after story was being prioritized, defined, and implemented, pushing the project towards a successful launch in 2025. It was clear that because of my diligent legwork early the project, I was able to provide a strong, shared foundation across all functions so we could all work toward the same end goal together.