Overview
Designing for complexity — where mistakes cost real money
NAB's assisted servicing channel handles some of the most consequential moments in a customer's financial life: blocking a compromised card, onboarding a Power of Attorney representative, transitioning business accounts. These aren't flows you can design with a standard component library and call it done.
Over two years embedded in NAB's Business Banking squads, I led UX across five major workstreams — navigating a legacy design system, complex compliance constraints, and operational realities that no journey map fully captures.
The Challenge
Legacy systems, high stakes, zero room for error
Banker-facing tools at NAB had grown organically over decades. Each team built their own flows, their own patterns, their own workarounds. The result: bankers toggling between 12+ screens to complete a single servicing request, relying on Post-it notes and institutional memory to avoid errors that could leave a customer locked out of their account or, worse, expose NAB to fraud liability.
The challenge wasn't just UI cleanup — it was understanding the invisible complexity underneath. When a banker blocks a card, what happens to scheduled payments? What's the liability window? Who gets notified? The answer to every one of those questions had to live in the design, not the training manual.
Workstreams
Five projects, one consistent approach
Block & Unblock Card Visibility
Bankers had no reliable way to confirm a card's current block status before actioning a request. I redesigned the card servicing surface to surface block state prominently, reduce mis-actions, and create a clear audit trail — validated across 3 rounds of usability testing with frontline bankers.
Power of Attorney (POA) Onboarding
The POA onboarding flow spanned legal documentation, identity verification, and account-level permissions — a process that routinely took bankers 45+ minutes and still generated exceptions. I mapped the full service journey, identified 11 distinct failure points, and designed a guided flow that compressed time-on-task and made compliance requirements legible at every step.
Card Servicing Redesign
A holistic redesign of the card management surface — covering lost/stolen, PIN resets, card replacements, and travel notifications. Reduced the number of screens required for common tasks from an average of 7 to 3, without sacrificing the compliance steps required for fraud protection.
Account Switching & Transition Flows
When a business customer transitions account types, the impact ripples across linked products, scheduled payments, and reporting permissions. I designed decision trees that surfaced downstream consequences before the banker confirmed any action — turning a dangerous one-click into an informed multi-step process.
Design System Contribution
Across all five workstreams, I maintained close collaboration with NAB's design system team — contributing new patterns for status indicators, multi-state action confirmations, and complex table interactions that were subsequently adopted across other business banking squads.
Process
Research-first, always
Every project started with time in the branch or on the phone with bankers. Not surveys — actual observation. Watching where the cursor paused, where the banker reached for a sticky note, where they apologised to the customer for a wait. That observational data was richer than any interview.
From there: journey mapping, opportunity scoping, low-fi wireframes tested with bankers before a pixel of high-fidelity work was produced. NAB's compliance team was brought in early, not at the end — a lesson learned on project one and applied to every project after.
"The moment you treat compliance as a constraint to work around rather than a stakeholder to design with, you're building something that will get rejected at the last gate."
Prototypes were tested in Figma with representative bankers across metro and regional branches — a deliberate sampling choice, since regional branches often handle edge cases that metro-centric testing misses.
Outcome
Measurable improvement where it matters
Across the five workstreams: reduced average task completion time on card servicing by 35%, eliminated the most common mis-action in the block/unblock flow, and delivered a POA onboarding process that cut exception rates significantly in UAT.
The design patterns I introduced were adopted beyond the Business Banking squad — the status indicator system and confirmation dialog patterns are now part of NAB's broader banker tooling library.
More than the metrics: bankers stopped telling us they dreaded this part of their job.