product design · wells fargo
wells fargo
three public-site migrations, each one deadline away from decommission or a compliance failure. moving legacy financial products onto a responsive, policy-compliant design system.
- role
- product designer
- context
- wells fargo · wf.com public site
- year
- 2025
product thesis
three public-site products, three kinds of trouble: one scheduled for decommission over policy violations, one never made responsive, one that existed only as a pdf. same constraints on all three: policy, legal, a legacy cms, a deadline. two are live on wellsfargo.com, so you can check the result.
role and ownership
as a product designer on the public site, i co-led the migration of legacy financial experiences onto wells fargo's responsive design system, with a product designer and a content designer in the us, and across the line-of-business product team, legal, cms and engineering.
the brief was the same each time. make it simpler, make it compliant, make it work on a phone, and do not break the business already running through it.
three parts of that were ai-assisted: the competitor analysis and synthesis, the early brainstorming and wireframing, and the brand visuals. nothing they produced reached a page without surviving legal review.
what could not move
policy
practice finance was set for decommission over policy violations. staying compliant came before anything i wanted to change about it.
legal
every page went through legal review, which shaped the architecture long before it shaped a layout.
the existing site
the plcc redesign had to fold into wf.com for tracking and seo rather than survive as a standalone microsite.
accessibility
dense legacy charts and tables had to fit the design system across six breakpoints and pass enterprise wcag, on a speed-to-market deadline.
the nda
the internal work stays behind it: comps, research, the roadmap, anything unshipped. the pages that launched are public property of the open web, so those are shown here as they run today.
three migrations
rescue practice finance
why
the practice-finance site was set for decommission by may 2026 over policy violations and poor mobile usability, taking digital loan origination for ~1,000 monthly visitors with it.
tradeoff
anything i wanted to change for design reasons came after keeping it compliant and keeping it live.
result
a six-plus-page architecture consolidated into one conversion-focused landing and one simplified contact flow, signed off as a policy-compliant experience. i designed the decommission messaging alongside it: what a visitor would have met if the date passed and the site came down anyway.
simplify the plcc experience
why
3.8m retail-services customers, 1m new a year, sat on a dated, non-responsive microsite that drove ~200k monthly visits and 120k service calls a month at $11.37 each, clustered around login, payments, agreements and mobile banking.
tradeoff
the redesign had to fold into wf.com for tracking and seo, not survive as a standalone microsite.
result
a ux audit, competitor synthesis and ia rework cut nine pages to four, over 50% less structural complexity, with clear paths to the highest-frequency tasks and room to reduce those calls.
digitize the sustainability report
why
wells fargo's annual esg report was trapped in a static, inaccessible pdf, a version-control and compliance risk with a poor mobile experience.
tradeoff
dense legacy charts and tables had to fit the design system across six breakpoints and pass enterprise wcag, on a speed-to-market deadline.
result
a responsive, accessible web experience: 100% digital adoption, the legacy pdf deprecated so outdated compliance data can no longer circulate.
shipped, and public
everything below is a live wellsfargo.com page, captured september 2026. nothing left to redact: a page a bank publishes to the open internet is not confidential.
what it proves: the work survived policy, legal review, a legacy cms and enterprise accessibility, which is the part of this job that kills designs. what it does not prove is which pixels were mine. i co-led these migrations with a line-of-business product team across the us and india.
the person i kept coming back to was someone on a phone between appointments, looking for one number. that was the test i could actually apply to a page.
outcome
practice finance and its contact flow are live and linked above, and the sustainability experience replaced the pdf outright. the plcc redesign is designed and handed off, and has not been released yet.
the internal material stays behind a wells fargo nda, so the comps, the research and the roadmap are described here rather than shown. the live pages are public, and are shown as they run.
want the full story?
the comps, the research, the ia explorations and the directions that were rejected along the way stay behind a wells fargo nda.
i am happy to walk through the full process privately, including the parts that did not ship.
reflection
most of the work that mattered happened before anything looked like a screen: cutting scope with the product team, getting legal and engineering to agree on what was possible. by the time i was moving things around a page, the difficult calls had already been made.