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04
CommunityAmerica
Digital Banking Migration
CommunityAmerica · 2026
- Problem
- A migration is not a redesign. People don’t show up to admire the new app. They show up to check a balance, pay a bill, deposit a check. The same things they did yesterday, except now everything around those things has moved. Get it wrong and you don’t just annoy someone. You shake their trust in the place that holds their money, right when they didn’t ask for any of this. And this was two member bases at once. Unify’s members and ours, coming from two different old platforms, on two different timelines. So it was really two migrations, not one.
- Constraints
- The new platform, Q2, has its own limits. Not every ideal experience is buildable on day one. Two populations that each needed their own path, their own communications, their own onboarding. A partner credit union to stay aligned with. And trust as a hard constraint, not a nice-to-have. Trust is slow to earn and fast to lose, and a forced move is exactly when it’s most fragile.
- Process
- I led the research strategy. Four studies across a year, on navigation, information architecture, and what actually has to be there on day one. I designed the navigation and the IA for the new experience. I wrote the UX principles and the decision frameworks the team could lean on when I wasn’t in the room. And I held a shared source of truth across product, design, engineering, and operations, so settled questions stayed settled.
- Outcome
- It just launched. It’s in members’ hands now, which is the moment all the preparation gets tested. This early, the honest outcome is the discipline that went in. Day-one scope drawn against the risk. Trust treated as the spec. The number that will matter is whether people barely notice the ground moved. Ask me in a few months.
- Lessons
- This is the moment the work stops being one feature at a time and becomes an experience I’m responsible for. It’s the highest-stakes thing I’ve designed. The goal was narrow and hard: move everyone onto the new platform without making them feel the ground shift.