Labs – focus units tasked to tackle specific technologies and ideas – have been growing in popularity among banks lately.

Most established banks already have “innovation labs” – which focus on identifying fintech trends and partnerships – in place, and many test distributed ledger technology applications in “blockchain labs.” USAA  took a different route: the 12 million-member financial services provider launched a design studio in Austin recently, which will soon house 120 employees.

As digital tools increasingly become the bank’s main channel for customer interaction, the design studio will be tasked with making sure those interactions are intuitive and seamless, according to Meriah Garrett, USAA’s chief design officer and the lead at the new studio.

To accomplish that, Garrett’s team will operate  in a tight collaboration with USAA’s developers. “It’s a designer’s dream to be invited into all of these conversations and have the collaboration that we do,” she said.

Bank Innovation spoke with Garrett about design, AI and coding, as she takes over the operations at the new studio.

What kind of projects should we expect to come out from the new lab?

We are growing our design practice more than ever before, to help better support the business. We don’t actually have our own project priorities. We serve and align to our business partners. Our goal is to help the business tackle the work with a new lens that focuses on building empathy with our members, understanding their unmet needs and shaping experiences that are designed from the member point of view. 

I imagine the new studio works closely with USAA’s tech team. How will this collaboration improve the digital offerings at USAA?

Yes, we work very closely with our architects and developers to make sure the things we are designing are feasible and that we understand the underlying systems, and to imagine the possibilities together. Design can help articulate needs that inform our core technology decisions, from the data and data science that it takes to deliver great advice, to the micro-services that help a responsive UI work efficiently on multiple device types. Through this partnering, we’re working to improve many of our key member and employee experiences, and to help shape the core tech capabilities we will need for the future.

Design also extends beyond what you might call our digital channels into helping inform the process improvements that can remove friction in the member experience, and even into new ways to look at product itself. This is part of why it’s such a great time to be in this discipline and growing this discipline at USAA right now; it’s a designer’s dream to be invited into all of these conversations and have the collaboration that we do.

Will we see any further applications of AI and machine learning in USAA app and online channels? How will the new studio contribute?

This is a space we’re digging into as we speak. There is such potential here to help deliver more relevant content and advice to our membership. But the key is to always do it with that human lens. What need are you solving? What is the right way to assure that the member welcomes the conversation?

For design, this space is the next frontier of our discipline; it requires us to design more for content and response types rather than explicit messaging. To push beyond a screen with a placeholder for “magically relevant message goes here,” and to start to get into the conversation around the data that is feeding the machine and the types of outputs we want to drive. We’re all about helping to positively influence our members’ behavior in order to facilitate their fanatical security, but you have to earn permission to give those nudges, which means not just brand trust, but spot on relevance.

What is on top of your priority list, stepping into this new role?

My priority is to create a great environment for our existing designers, to build up the practice, to hire top quality talent and then to pair those people with the business to accomplish the business priorities. In fact, from a product/project perspective, we pride ourselves on not having our own priorities. We’re advisors and a service team; this makes us better partners and removes a layer of conflict that organizations can experience when everyone has their own priorities.

What’s one project that you are looking forward to in the next few months?

While design is very much about craft, I’m also a bit of a “reuse” junkie. So the work we’re doing right now around our design language system and building out reusable components to achieve both code efficiency and a consistent experience for our members gets me very excited. Having a consistent experience isn’t about top down governance; it’s about making the tools available and helping people understand their power and value.

We’re just now starting to build out experiences with this updated visual language and set of strong building blocks, so seeing that come to life is a great moment. We’re making sure that we’re learning, iterating and letting this be a living language, rather than a stagnant style guide or set of rules. Those details connect me back to my practitioner days and the importance of nuance in design.