Chase Mobile App: Self-Directed Investing
When I joined Chase as a senior content designer, the Self-Directed Investing experience on the mobile app had a problem you could feel within thirty seconds of using it: users couldn’t reliably do the basics. Transferring money, executing trades, or even finding the stocks they already owned took more taps than it should have, and the menu labels didn’t map to how anyone actually described those tasks.
Over roughly two and a half years, I led content design for a phased rebuild of the dashboard navigation, working alongside product, engineering, research, and design partners across multiple release cycles. The fix was largely in the labels and information hierarchy: replacing ambiguous menu items like “Trade” and “Manage” with task-named ones tested against real customer language.
The result: a 200% increase in engagement with key jobs-to-be-done across the experience, a 110% increase in trade volume from mobile, and a 60% reduction in call volume on questions related to navigation. After a multi-year effort, we were finally able to create meaningful changes that moved the experience from “workable for power users” to “findable for everyone.”
The dashboard navigation rebuild
Navigation
Navigation was the biggest issue for users. To solve it, we took a closer look at how users actually completed their key tasks in the app, where they got stuck, and what they were calling the things they were trying to do.
Competitive patterns showed us where the category had landed; heatmaps and tap data showed us where users actually got stuck; customer interviews told us why. We didn’t ship a change unless those three pointed the same direction.
Labels in practice
The hardest label work wasn’t the obvious one. To take an example, the word “Trade” meant something specific to power users, ambiguous to mainstream investors, and outright confusing to first-time users. Three audiences, one label.
Before: “Trade”
After: “Buy or sell”
Why: Matched the verbs customers used in interviews, and removed the assumption that users knew what “a trade” was.
Before: “Manage”
After: “Transfers & payments”
Why: Named the actual jobs underneath. “Manage” had been catching too many unrelated tasks.
Before: “Explore”
After: “Explore investments”
Why: Disambiguated from the bank-side “Explore” menu. Same word, different surface, two different jobs.
Rolling it out in phases
We didn’t ship the whole rebuild at once. The dashboard was foundational, the next layer of changes was for the menu structure, and the final phase tied it all together with the new tab bar at the bottom of the experience. Each phase was tested with users, measured against the existing baseline, and tuned before the next phase shipped.
In the test phase, what we called the “floating blueberries” (the legacy tile-based dashboard) was replaced with a more structured tabbed interface. We tested both directly with users. The tabbed version won on findability, scannability, and task completion across every measured group.
Outcomes
Measured against the pre-launch baseline:
What I learned
Three things stuck with me from this work:
Labels are a stakeholder problem before they’re a writing problem. The same label has to satisfy product, legal, compliance, and the user’s mental model. The craft was finding the version where all four could live.
Triangulation matters more than any single research method. Competitive patterns showed us where the category had landed; heatmaps and tap data showed us where users actually got stuck; customer interviews told us why. We didn’t ship a change unless those three pointed the same direction.
Phased rollouts let you test conviction without betting the whole experience on a single launch. Each phase paid for the next one in measurable improvement, which is how a multi-year effort kept its budget and its scope.
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