Truist
Financial Empowerment & Content Design
UX Writing | Content Strategy | Microcopy | Content Design
Starting in 2024, I began working as a content designer for Truist, one of the largest super-regional banks in the United States. As a Senior Content Designer II working in digital banking design, I create content and help guide feature creation within the financial institution’s authenticated space. “Authenticated” is just a fancy way of saying it’s for features and products that are offered to clients after they log in to their account. What this means for my work is two-fold:
1) It’s highly regulated. Marketing within the authenticated space is an incredibly grey area that is fraught with federal regulation and requirements. This makes for a fun challenge: How can we educate and encourage our clients to interact with the features, products, and services we provide without promising, with limited space, and sometimes with walls of disclosure text around it?
2) Screenshots are… hard. If not impossible. We currently service four different client types (retail, rich retail (premiere), really rich retail (wealth), and small business). Each segment has a different experience in both web and app. And content is different for each of those clients. But, in order to get screens for those segments, I’d have to have access to those account types. And, well, while I’d love to say I’m of the wealthy class — my bank account disagrees.
Financial Empowerment
Working in Truist’s financial empowerment space, I partner with UI and UX designers to build features and tools involving personal finance management (PFM). That involves financial planning, credit score monitoring, spending management, and goal planning.
It’s an incredible space that means a lot of different things to different people. What originally started as a playground for individuals preparing to retire, our goal is to update and refine these offerings to reach beyond that older, established demographic. Instead, we’re concepting and building a new suite of PFM tools that can reach younger audiences (a demographic Truist is interested in, but has struggled to reach in the past). As a content designer, that means updating and modernizing content to better connect with what matters to them today — while educating and guiding them to think about how those decisions affect their future.
Content Design Style Guide
Leaning on my past work of voice and tone development, I’ve been honored to take a leading role in updating and developing Truist’s UX content style guide. This guide sits as an accompaniment to the bank’s traditional style guide, and is designed to empower and equip UX writers with guidance unique to our digital space. With bi-weekly meetings and regular releases, the guide helps outline approaches to microcopy, CTAs, specific product terms, how to develop content for error states/banners/toast messages, and more.
As one of the leaders of this initiative, I’m responsible for making updates to our live files in Figma, creating and updating components, guiding conversations on decisions made, and setting release cadences. It’s fun work and helps our content designers write more consistently across web and app, ensures parity across features, and makes their jobs easier.
Insights
A large part of my content work revolves around Truist’s goal to deliver better, targeted information to its clients. Working with a third-party vendor, we ideate and design Truist’s suite of financial insights across our user segments, offering our clients highly targeted financial advice based around their cash flow, potentially suspicious account activity, spending habits, and growth patterns. All in an effort to help them manage their debt, keep they money safe, and grow their wealth.