USAA iPhone App + Deposit@Mobile

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Early Writing

3 min readSep 13, 2009

World-class banking just crawled all up in your pocket! In July of 2007 I was recruited by USAA in San Antonio, Texas, as a contract designer during the closing months of a massive web redesign campaign. Six months into my contract USAA made a full-timer out of me and I joined a small team of UI Designers responsible for the core applications of usaa.com, like My Accounts, Web Billpay, and Account Summary pages. My primary responsibility was to engineer the UI of mobile.usaa.com.

Mobile.usaa.com

For nearly 14 months I was the “mobile guy.” My job was to figure out how to design for a market of mobile browsers that had no foreseeable interest in standardization. Most of our user base used BlackBerry or LG devices, though smart phones, specifically iPhones, were starting to creep into the reports. BlackBerry soon became (and continues to be) my nemesis. Take a look at the BlackBerry CSS matrix for most models between 2007 and 2008 and you’ll get an idea of what I was up against: twenty-some declarations for borders, but no padding, margin, line-height, display, positioning or text-indent support. BlackBerry quickly became our lowest-common-denominator.

My direction was pretty simple. Market forces will push the mobile browser industry to eventually (hopefully) get its act together and, just as we saw in the late nineties, subpar browsers will die out and a few standouts will gobble up market share. We could do what many other mobile sites did at the time and dump heaps of presentational crap code into our templates to make it look right now, or we could create proper semantic code and leverage a true separation between structure and presentation, and enhance the interface as the mobile industry geared up to do battle with Apple.

By focusing on the semantic function of our templates and ignoring the visual we were able to pull together the most portable, versatile and heavily reused web application in the USAA arsenal. Through collaborating directly with business, infrastructure, security, and marketing, we were able to serve up the site with any one of a half dozen presentation layers custom tailored to fit the particular channel or context for which it was called. After we launched mobile.usaa.com, deployed military personnel could track their finances and pay their bills in record time from all around the globe. Awesome.

USAA iPhone App + Deposit@Mobile

My last big project at USAA was to plan and design the complete user experience of USAA’s new iPhone App. I parted ways with USAA in late February 2009 to pursue grad school but was quite pleased to see the app launch about 99% as I had designed it. This project was pretty intense, but was an excellent example of what can happen when you lock business, design, security, legal, infrastructure and a couple genius developers in the basement.

Since the app presented another unpaved channel, I had a lot of freedom with my approach. Every screen was intended to be as optimized and streamlined as possible. Unless a feature or design element was absolutely critical to its own particular instance, it was scrubbed. And if its absence introduced even the most remote sense of uncertainty for the user, the entire flow was reevaluated and refined.

USAA iPhone App + Deposit@Mobile

Mobile.usaa.com

USAA iPhone App + Deposit@Mobile

A few kind press mentions

Written by Dustin Larimer