A modern digital foundation built to reflect a relationship-first bank.
Northern Bank & Trust had built its reputation on relationships and community for more than 60 years, but its digital experience no longer carried that promise. Over eight weeks I led the UX, established a scalable design system alongside a Senior UI Designer, and shipped a flexible foundation the bank could keep growing into long after launch.
The bank's digital experience had been patched together over years of incremental edits. Customers leaned on branches for answers the website should have already provided, and internal teams had no consistent way to publish new content.
More than 35 product, service, and education pages had drifted into separate visual and editorial systems, eroding the sense of one trusted brand.
Customers struggled to compare accounts and loans online, defaulting to branch visits for decisions a clear digital experience should support.
Every new initiative required bespoke design and development, slowing the bank's ability to respond to market and regulatory change.
Marketing depended on design for routine updates, creating a bottleneck that limited how often the site could evolve.
The site finally feels like walking into one of our branches — clear, calm, and genuinely helpful before anyone asks for help.
Rather than redesigning individual screens, the work focused on creating a unified digital language that customers could recognize, trust, and navigate with confidence. Every interaction, component, and visual decision reinforced a relationship-first banking experience built to scale.
Every public-facing page, authenticated workflow, and customer interaction was redesigned to feel like one cohesive banking experience instead of disconnected products.
Reusable components, interaction patterns, and visual standards created a consistent experience while accelerating future product development.
Every interface prioritized clarity, familiarity, and confidence to reinforce Northern Bank's relationship-driven approach to banking.
A trusted regional bank's digital presence felt dated, fragmented, and difficult to navigate — undermining the confidence customers expected before ever walking into a branch.
Modernize the experience as a system, not a website, so every future product, page, and campaign could ship faster while reinforcing the same sense of trust.
Unified 35+ customer touchpoints into a single cohesive experience supported by a reusable design system and CMS patterns the internal team now extends without redesign.
The new experience is organized around the value it creates for customers and the bank, not the volume of pages it contains. Every surface was designed to make the right next step obvious.
Account and loan options were buried behind generic department labels.
Top customer tasks now sit within a single click of the homepage.
Every surface ships from a shared system — tokens, components, and patterns documented so future teams can extend the product without re-deriving its rules.
Marketing pages, authenticated experiences, educational content, and customer journeys were brought into one cohesive digital language.
A reusable design system established consistent visual patterns, interaction behaviors, and component standards.
From experience audit and brand refinement through production-ready designs and implementation support.
Every interaction reinforced Northern Bank's relationship-driven approach through clarity, consistency, and trust.
Flexible page templates empowered internal teams to launch campaigns without redesigning layouts.
A modular design system prepared the platform to support future products, services, and marketing initiatives.
The redesign created consistency, scalability, and trust—not just attractive interfaces. Northern Bank gained a durable digital foundation capable of supporting long-term growth across every customer touchpoint.
Treating the engagement as system design instead of site design. Every page composed from the same library meant trust signals, navigation, and content patterns stayed coherent as the experience grew.
How quickly marketing adopted the CMS modules. Once editors saw they could ship without a design loop, the backlog they had been quietly carrying for months moved in weeks.
I'd invest earlier in lightweight usability testing on the comparison and rate modules. The patterns landed well, but a single validation round would have de-risked the highest-stakes decisions even further.
Every case study in this portfolio began with a complex problem, an ambitious team, and a decision to build something better. If you’re solving the next one, I’d love to help write its success story.
