Axos Fiduciary Services

The Product: Unity

Unity is a Chapter 7 bankruptcy and fiduciary service software acquired by Axos Bank. The software enables trustees to set up bank accounts, manage their bankruptcy cases, itemize their clients' assets, and much more. It's a sophisticated system with numerous moving components and has been in use for many years.

Year
????-2021
Software
Figma
(Switched from Sketch)
The team I worked with:
  • 1 Product Owner
  • 4-6 Relationship Managers
  • 2 Business Analysts
  • 1 Development Manager
  • 8 Backend Developers
  • 4 Quality Assurance

Sitemap/Audit

Upon joining Axos Bank Fiduciary Services, I noticed a lack of documentation and a design system. To address both issues, I began the creation of a sitemap to visualize the relationships between the main pages. Concurrently, I captured screenshots and identified areas that raised concerns or needed further investigation.

After gathering a significant amount of data, I observed numerous inconsistencies within Unity. To systematically document these problems, I meticulously audited every component across all pages and developed a comprehensive worksheet. This process not only highlighted all the issues but also pinpointed their locations for future fixes.

The Dewey Decimal System

A large part of my audit involved revising the messaging for our tooltips. My task was to establish more effective messaging standards. As with my previous approach, I carefully audited each page, identifying all tooltip instances within Unity such as:

  • Location within Unity
  • Location on the page
  • Mouse event to activate tooltip
  • Tooltip type
  • Message type

I then categorized my findings, and within those categories, I looked for patterns. From these patterns, I developed a coding system to streamline the tracking and identification of our existing tooltips. This same categorization and coding were applied to the new messaging standards. By condensing the messages into a concise code, it became more straightforward for developers to locate specific message templates.

Design Wiki

A challenge emerged when we attempted to standardize both the Component Library and the tooltip messaging: Unity did not have a clear resource for all this information. Using Confluence, I created documentation for all our active components, highlighting those that were outdated, and provided specifications for the development team.

Customer Workflow

During my audit, I observed an absence of workflow documentation. Collaborating with the Business Analyst, Relationship Managers, and Product Owner, we jointly crafted a detailed Chapter 7 Trustee workflow, outlining how their requirements corresponded with Unity.

Prototypes

Beyond my auditing and documentation, I worked with multiple development teams and BAs to continue helping complete workflows for features and enhancements based on the company's priority roadmap. I completed high-fidelity prototypes for well over 30 projects, both small and large. Every process began with researching the BAs' requirements, creating interactive prototypes for stakeholders to discuss revisions and potentially sign off on, and then handing the prototypes along with any necessary documentation over to the development team. Once development was complete, I assisted the QA team to ensure the development teams' work stayed in line with design standards and was part of the final approval process.

Component Library

Another task was streamlining Unity's component library. Leveraging my audit, I eliminated components that had become obsolete. For any component with multiple variations, I utilized the refined Library to establish foundational standards for upcoming projects.