Wells Fargo

ABOUT
Wells Fargo & Company is an American multinational financial services company headquartered in San Francisco, California, with central offices throughout the United States. It is the world's fourth-largest bank by market capitalization and the fourth largest bank in the US by total assets.

Project: Wells Fargo Mobile® Biometric Sign-On for Google Pixel 4/4 XL (Android)
Timeline: 12 Months
Methods: In-Person, Iterative Testing
Tools: Sketch, InVision, iRise
My Role: Product UX Design Lead
Results: ⬆ Monthly Active Users

Project Overview

Defining the Problem

Each month, customer service is flooded with roughly 300K calls from customers who can’t sign on to their accounts and struggle with self-service – costing the bank $18MM per year. Of the 25MM sessions that end every month with a failed sign-on, 6 in 10 attempt to create a new password fail on the first try.

Google launched the Pixel 4 and 4 XL phones in November 2019. Unlike prior Pixel phones, the 4's didn't have a fingerprint sensor. The biometric option supported was called Face Unlock and used the new Google BiometricPrompt API. There were less than 50K customers with these devices that could only sign on to the Wells Fargo Mobile® app with their username and password.

"I want to see my account activity, but my password won’t work, and I can’t sign on." — Wells Fargo customer

"Wells Fargo doesn’t make it easy to create a new password, and it would probably use be faster for me to call so they can tell me what I need to know." — Wells Fargo customer

Approach

Goals and Objectives

We wanted to design an experience that allowed Google Pixel 4/4 XL (Android) customers the ability to sign on using their face instead of their username and password. We also wanted to create designs that strategically positioned Wells Fargo to support future product enhancements on iOS (Face ID® and Touch ID® across both iPhone and iPad). Parallel efforts also included migrating and rebuilding the existing multi-mobile (M2) experiences onto native iOS and Android experiences.

Research and Discovery

How we got there

Our first goal was to better understand current biometric authentication trends, and how it might work for customers within the existing Wells Fargo mobile app. We gathered, reviewed and analyzed existing design artifacts such as customer personas, customer journey maps, user flow diagrams, recent usability test findings, and other product performance reports.

We reviewed direct call center customer feedback to identify some of the pain points users had, and conducted stakeholder interviews with product owners and developers to better understand overall product roadmap, future states, technical constraints and potential implementation challenges.

Through competitive analysis, the team learned about other financial institutions* that were supporting biometric sign-on for Pixel 4 which helped inform and drive key design decisions.

*Ally, American Express, Barclays, Citibank, Chase, Discover, E*Trade, Navy Federal, USAA

Design: User Flows

Biometric authentication enable / disable

Users could enter the biometric authentication enable / disable experience from three different entry points:

• Sign on screen
• Sign on (auto-prompt) screen
• Profile & Settings menu

Design

Biometric Authentication landing pages

Our goal in delivering a consistent experience across mobile app and web meant we needed to align with the marketing team to insure the design and content messaging of the landing page (and linked FAQs) were consistent for customers looking for more info about Android™ Biometric Sign-On.