Client: RBC Royal Bank
Role: Senior User Experience Designer
Focus: Mobile UX • Financial Accessibility • Compliance • Service Design
Project Overview
RBC was expanding its digital banking ecosystem to include a mobile wallet and contactless payments experience within the existing RBC Mobile App.
The goal was to simplify how customers add, manage, and use their cards while ensuring the product met the highest standards of security, accessibility, and compliance across multiple mobile platforms.
I was responsible for leading the user experience and accessibility design for the wallet’s onboarding and transactional journeys, bridging product, compliance, and development teams to deliver a frictionless, inclusive, and compliant mobile payment experience.
The Challenge
- Security and Trust: Digital wallet adoption depended on user confidence in data protection and transaction transparency.
- Complex Ecosystem: The wallet had to integrate seamlessly with multiple card types (credit, debit, business) and platforms (Apple Pay, Android Pay, RBC Pay).
- Accessibility Requirements: As a Tier 1 Canadian financial institution, RBC’s digital products needed to comply with WCAG 2.1 AA, AODA, and internal accessibility policies.
- Cross-Platform Consistency: The wallet had to behave predictably across iOS and Android devices, maintaining visual and functional parity.
- Regulatory Constraints: Legal disclaimers, encryption notices, and privacy disclosures had to be visible yet non-intrusive.
My Role & Contributions
1. Discovery & Research
- Conducted usability benchmarking on existing RBC mobile experiences and competitor wallets (Apple, TD, Scotiabank).
- Collaborated with business, risk, and compliance teams to map end-to-end payment flows and identify high-risk friction points.
- Created personas and journey maps representing both tech-savvy users and customers less familiar with digital payments.
2. Experience Mapping & Flow Design
- Mapped service blueprints outlining the interaction between the user, the RBC app, backend systems, and third-party payment gateways.
- Defined onboarding and authentication flows, including card provisioning, verification, and tokenization.
- Simplified multi-step verification into a progressive onboarding experience with real-time status feedback and clear security cues.
3. Accessibility & Inclusive Design
- Embedded WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility principles at every stage of design — text contrast, readable labels, large touch targets, and assistive tech support.
- Conducted JAWS and NVDA testing to validate screen-reader and keyboard navigation for wallet setup and payment confirmation screens.
- Partnered with RBC’s accessibility governance team to document conformance checkpoints and remediation plans.
4. Interaction & Visual Design
- Designed mobile-first interfaces optimized for one-handed use and low-distraction interactions during checkout.
- Incorporated micro-interactions and animations to confirm secure actions (card added, transaction complete).
- Worked closely with the design system team to integrate wallet components into RBC’s broader Digital Experience Platform.
5. Collaboration & Delivery
- Worked within Agile sprints using JIRA/Confluence to manage user stories and accessibility acceptance criteria.
- Partnered with QA, compliance, and engineering to ensure parity across platforms and audit readiness for launch.
- Documented design rationale and success criteria for security and accessibility compliance.
Outcomes & Impact
- Delivered a fully accessible mobile wallet experience across iOS and Android.
- Reduced setup time by 40% through simplified onboarding and clearer verification flows.
- Improved customer trust scores in post-launch satisfaction surveys.
- Established design patterns for secure, accessible financial transactions, reused in future RBC mobile banking updates.
Reflection
This project showcased my ability to balance security, accessibility, and usability in a highly regulated environment.
By leading design for a system where trust and speed were equally important, I helped RBC deliver a modern, inclusive mobile wallet that set a new usability benchmark for Canadian banking.
