Relayout: Rebuilding the US Design Language
The US digital banking experience had been stuck for years in what the team came to call the "50/50" layout: essentially a mobile design stretched across half the screen, with an unused blue panel filling the other half. It existed because of an old handoff problem. Years earlier, Canada's rebrand had gone through an outside agency that ran over schedule, and the US ended up launching on its own timeline with only the mobile version of the new brand assets to work from. Every designer who touched BMO US wanted it fixed. It just took the design team growing large enough to actually fix it.
Becoming the Design Ambassador
I was given the Design Ambassador role for this work, both because of how long I'd worked with the brand and because I was the one pushing hardest for the change. I took the existing screens and components and designed full, modern desktop views from the ground up, not just adapted mobile layouts, across every major product in the banking experience. Once that initial set was done, other designers joined to carry the same approach across the rest of the mobile and web experience, a rollout that's still ongoing today.
The Trade-off: Shared Language, Not Shared Screens
Canadian leadership initially pushed for strict alignment between the two markets: shared components, one source of truth, less duplicated work. On the surface that made sense. But the US operates under different regulatory requirements, ADA accessibility standards, FDIC disclosures, and distinct privacy rules that directly shape how certain components need to behave, not just how they look, and US customers carried different mental models from their prior banking experience. Forcing strict parity meant overriding one side or the other; there wasn't a version where both won by default. I made the case using the regulatory and user differences directly: a library that shared visual language and interaction patterns with Canada, but with room to diverge specifically where the underlying requirements or user needs genuinely differed. It took several rounds, each with more specific evidence than the last, before the position held.
Building the System, Not Just the Screens
Alongside the redesign, I joined the US Library team, the group responsible for documenting, creating and auditing the components everyone else would build from. Because Relayout had to move faster than it could be documented, I brought much of that work to the Library team after the fact: dozens of components audited, documented against Canada's equivalents, and either kept, archived, or rebuilt, all with stakeholder buy-in secured through ongoing share-outs rather than dropped on people as a done deal.
That old layout is gone. In its place is a modern, accessible design language, still rolling out across every US product today.
