Case Study
Synergy is Northern Trust software that turns bank data into formats clients can use in their own third party systems. It supports the Wealth Passport platform, which serves ultra high net worth families, family offices, and their advisors. When I arrived, Synergy was dated, hard to navigate, and used so little that the product was planned for removal. The business team personally guided every interested user through it. I was the only UX designer brought in to rebuild it.
The redesigned Synergy. Entities, accounts, and mapping in one place, in the Wealth Passport look clients already knew.
The Problem
Stakeholders had asked for Synergy to be updated and aligned with the Wealth Passport application, but the problems ran deeper than looks. Users found it hard to navigate, hard to understand, and hard to personalize. It offered unclear instructions and too little feedback, so usage kept falling, and falling usage became the argument for removing the product altogether.
The legacy Synergy. Dense tables, dated styling, and no clear path through a task.
Usage was limited and falling. The learning curve of understanding the product drove interested users away, and the product was planned for removal.
The existing design required the business team to personally guide all interested users in using the application. A tool nobody can start alone does not scale.
An outdated interface, unclear instructions, and weak feedback made routine work feel risky, and pushed users to ask for help instead of trying.
Research
I started with a heuristic walkthrough of the whole product, screen by screen: navigation, hierarchy, interactions, and error handling. Then I worked through the analytics, the interview material Northern Trust already had, and direct user feedback, and mapped the workflows themselves to show where the complexity lived. A competitive review of other banks set the standard the redesign had to meet.
Finding. Navigation and hierarchy hid the main tasks, and weak feedback and error handling left users guessing about whether they had done something right.
Decision. The walkthrough findings, reviewed with the product owners, defined the minimum the redesign had to fix.
Finding. Banks such as UBS, Bank of America, Chase, and Citi had set a modern standard for clarity that Synergy did not approach.
Decision. The redesign would follow the Wealth Passport look and modern banking patterns, not the legacy product's habits.
Key Moves
Move One
Before redesigning anything, I mapped the Synergy workflows end to end. The maps showed where the complexity actually was, and what to modernize first, so the team stopped arguing about opinions and started discussing evidence. Combined with stakeholder feedback, the maps fed a north star vision that shaped the roadmap discussions that followed.
Finding: the complexity was real, but it was concentrated. A few workflows carried most of the pain. Decision: modernize the heaviest workflows first, and let the map sequence the rest.
Move Two
Synergy had to look like it belonged beside Wealth Passport, so I built a scalable Figma component library for the platform and designed from it. Screens stopped being one off efforts: patterns were built once, reused everywhere, and stayed consistent as the product grew.
Finding: every screen had been built on its own, so nothing matched and nothing could be reused. Decision: components first, screens second, so the design would scale past my contract.
Move Three
I redesigned the legacy interactions around the tasks users perform most often, connected banking tasks that had been scattered across separate journeys, and updated typography, contrast, and interactions using WCAG 2.1 AA guidance. The prototypes that came out of this work were what finally got stakeholders agreeing on how everyday workflows should run.
Finding: the daily tasks crossed journeys that the product treated as strangers. Decision: connect the related tasks, and let the frequent ones set the navigation.
Challenges
Usage was so low that removal was the plan. The redesign had to make the case for the product's life while fixing it.
I was the only designer, responsible for research, design, the component library, and the handoff, on a two week sprint rhythm.
Data mapping for client systems is intricate work. The job was to organize the complexity so users could carry it, not to pretend it away.
Two product owners, a development team, and executives all had a view of Synergy. The north star vision and the prototypes were how those views became one direction.
Outcome
The redesign was approved by the product owners and stakeholders, with the prototypes settling how everyday workflows should work, and the component library gave the team a foundation to keep building on. Northern Trust did not report usage numbers back to the design side, so I will not invent a recovery figure here. The claim I can stand behind is the work itself: a mapped product, a shared library, and an approved, accessible design for a product that had been planned for removal.