Chuck Huie

SunTrust BrightFolio is a smart, affordable, digital investing solution to help our clients invest for a future goal like retirement. Clients can begin with as little as $10,000 in investable assets. SunTrust worked with Future Advisor to build this experience.

The application consisted of three parts: 

• A marketing page intended to educate potential clients and persuade them to sign up
• An application for the user to input both personal and financial information
• A dashboard for the user to manage their investments

OBSTACLES TO OVERCOME

DEALING WITH A MISSING VENDOR AND ACHIEVING PIXEL-PERFECT EXECUTION

Through the course of this project we had to contend with two major issues; a vendor whose creative team quit mid-project and a development team with little-to-no experience with UI development. This posed a major threat to ensuring a cohesive user interface. 

These issues prompted the following:

• When our vendor’s creative team quit I had to step in as their art director and ultimately audit and redline their entire product to ensure adherence to our collective style guide. 
• With an inexperienced development team, I had to serve as coach and mentor and guide them in order to turn them into bona fide UI developers.

MY ROLE

DEFINE THE VISUAL AND INTERACTIVE EXPERIENCE

I was the lead designer on the team and was responsible for the design system, user interface and overall leadership in regards to execution of the product. I partnered with a UX designer and together we worked with a product manager to translate vision and ideas into specific features for launch. Additionally I worked with our PMs to align on testing efforts. This product launched in January of 2020.

THE FIRST CHALLENGE

HITTING A ROADBLOCK WITH OUR VENDOR

Midway through this project our vendor’s entire creative team quit. This hampered our ability to work together on the UI. This served as a major roadblock for the project because it was crucial the entire application have a seamless UI. At the time this happened, SunTrust had no control over our partner’s design or development. Fortunately, we had built a joint style guide at the project outset. By the time they had rehired a complete creative team and we got a glimpse of their UI, it didn’t remotely resemble the product we were working on. It fell on my shoulders to ensure that both sides had a unified UI. This entailed serving as UI director for both the SunTrust experience as well as our vendor experience until both were aligned.

Below are some sample redlines I created from Future Advisors first UI screens.

VENDOR REALIGNMENT

BACK ON TRACK AT THE LAST MINUTE

To the credit of the new creative director and creative team at Future Advisor, once they realized they were off-course with their entire UI, they stopped all dev efforts and followed both our style guide and my redlined files perfectly. The result was a seamless UI between SunTrust and Future Advisor that felt and looked like one product from beginning to end, and more importantly we didn’t lose any time.

THE SECOND CHALLENGE

PIXEL-PERFECT EXECUTION

An issue that surfaced concurrently with the vendor issue was poorly executed UI on SunTrust’s part. Fortunately, as we were having regular demos, these UI problems were obvious and I caught them quickly. Typography, margins, color, scalability and general layout specifications were not remotely close to the files that were delivered to them, and this in spite of the fact that I had sent them HTML specs via Sketch export. 

To resolve this issue I set up a regular meeting cadence, once per week, with the UI developers. In this meeting we would review the existing and current UI dev efforts. These were working sessions where we would walk together through each element of the UI to ensure pixel-perfect execution. This involved many long meetings proving to the dev team that new things were possible and working with them to execute such things. 

In the end, the result was a flawlessly executed UI.