Prior Experience / Idean
USAA Mobile Accounts
Rethinking a destination visited 20 million times a month.
As new data services expanded what USAA could offer Members, the Account Summary team saw an opportunity to rethink the mobile account experience—making balances, transactions, account details, and emerging capabilities easier to understand and use.
01 / The Opportunity
More data created an opportunity for a better account experience.
New data services were giving USAA the ability to provide Members with richer transaction details, categorization, enhanced search, and more useful account information.
But introducing those capabilities meant reconsidering the experience around them—not simply adding more information to existing screens.
The team needed to understand how Members navigated their accounts today, identify where the existing experience created friction, and establish a structure that could support both immediate requirements and future capabilities.
02 / Co-Design
Start with a shared definition of what success looks like.
The engagement began with a co-design workshop with USAA's Account Summary team to establish roles, align on goals, define the experience vision, determine how success would be measured, and work through initial requirements.
The team also reviewed defect-call data provided by USAA Member Service Representatives, bringing real service issues into the product and design priorities from the beginning.
03 / Evaluation
At this scale, change needed to be deliberate.
Approximate monthly visits to Account Summary
Before changing such a familiar destination, the team evaluated the existing mobile experience screen by screen across platforms—examining design, functionality, architecture, and areas of friction.
The goal wasn't to redesign for the sake of redesigning. It was to understand what should be preserved, what needed to improve, and where new capabilities could create meaningful value.
04 / Information Architecture
Organize the experience around what Members need to do.
The team reframed functional requirements around how they would benefit Members, then mapped the information architecture and application flows needed to support both immediate needs and future capabilities.
05 / Concept Design
Design beyond the immediate requirements to find the stronger experience.
Rather than moving directly from requirements into detailed screens, the team created high-fidelity concepts that explored what the account experience could become.
These concepts allowed the team to consider new interactions, information hierarchy, and functionality beyond the constraints of the initial requirements before converging on a direction.
06 / Prototyping
Make the experience real enough to react to.
High-fidelity, on-device prototypes helped the team evaluate the experience in context and communicate the direction to stakeholders across USAA, including other product teams at the Digital Roadmap Sync.
07 / Detailed Design
Turn the concept into a system that could be built.
After aligning around an experience direction, the team translated the concept into detailed designs supporting both MVP and Phase 2 functional requirements.
The work moved from an exploratory vision into the screens, states, interactions, and components required for implementation.
08 / Validation
Test it with Members before locking it down.
The team created scenarios, prototypes, and supporting artifacts for multiple rounds of evaluation.
Usability Expert Review
Guerrilla Testing
Member Feedback
Accessibility Review
Insights from those sessions were used to refine the experience before final delivery.
09 / Design Delivery
One experience, across devices and platforms.
Following testing, the team refined the experience for development across iOS and Android, accounting for portrait, landscape, and tablet layouts.
Detailed component specifications helped preserve consistency as the experience moved from design into implementation.
Experience
Final iOS account and transaction experiences refined from concept and testing.
Platform variants
Android, portrait, landscape, and tablet layouts accounted for across the experience.
Specification
Detailed component guidance created to preserve consistency through implementation.
From account summary to a more capable mobile banking experience.
By connecting product requirements, service issues, information architecture, concept exploration, Member testing and cross-platform design, the team created a clearer foundation for USAA's evolving mobile account experience.
Complex products need more than a new interface.
Stilly brings product strategy, experience design, prototyping, and delivery together to make complex digital products easier to understand and use.
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