BNY Mellon is an investment management and investment services company established in 1784. It has had over hundreds of acquisitions in its existence, and over 29 just in the last 10 years, leading to a disparity in user interface styles used throughout the company. In 2013 the UX team was a new addition to the development culture at BNY Mellon. During ramp-up, the UX team found that there was a lack of coherency in the methods used by different lines of business when it came to developing applications. In a company with over 400 unique enterprise applications and 9 lines of businesses, this presented major a challenge for the new and growing UX team. In early 2014, the newly established internal User Experience team built a platform to educate employees and business units about the need for a consistent set of UX best practices across the organization. The User Experience Center of Excellence was built to address improve education about best UX practices outside of the team. The site provides employees with guidance, resources, and a standardized way to integrate UX design into each line of business’s development process. In doing so, the UX team has created a website that creates an innovative user experience for user experience focused development.

Before the launch of the User Experience Center of Excellence site, BNY Mellon had over 400 estimated unique applications and 0 interface style guides used for any application. It had 9 lines of business with their own autonomous development process, and very limited use of user experience research and design in any of them. To clarify the extent of the challenge BNY Mellon’s technology department alone has 13,000 technology employees and only 2 UX designers. Following the launch of the COE, we now have over 560+ members of the company who have registered to use material provided on the site or to utilize our state of the art UX research lab. Our site has over 10,000+ front end lines of code and 50+ brand compliant icons, buttons, and layouts that can be consistently applied to each new product that comes out. Our site is driving the implementation of a 1 unified UX process for BNY Mellon and, as a result, creating a consistent, optimized user experience for employees and clients who have to use our applications.