Texas Capital Bank: How Far Behind Is the Experience, Exactly?

Most of my case studies end at a screen. This one starts in a room — the kickoff where a bank decides whether it believes the team it just hired. In 2021, through Deloitte Digital, I worked a month-long engagement for Texas Capital Bank as it launched a digital transformation. Before anyone talked redesign, I made a more useful question the whole engagement: how far behind is the experience, exactly? So the work wasn't a redesign — it was a heuristic evaluation and competitive teardown of TCB's consumer online banking, graded against Chase, Wells Fargo, and Marcus. Analysis and comparison, not a shipped product. The value was the evaluation, and the alignment it created.

A transformation this size is won or lost in the first room. The kickoff had to do two jobs at once: show the bank we genuinely understood its market, and give everyone a shared, evidence-based picture of where the experience stood. Get it right and the room agrees on the problem before anyone argues about the solution. The honest way to prove you understand a market isn't to walk in with a pitch — it's to audit it.

The complication was time — roughly a month. You can't run defensible primary research across a whole banking experience in that window. So I chose a method that trades breadth for defensibility: a heuristic evaluation — expert usability review against established best practices — paired with a targeted competitive benchmark. It won't tell you what real customers do; it tells you, rigorously and fast, where the experience sits against principles the field agrees are good and against the competitors setting expectations.

The centerpiece was a scorecard — six heuristics down the side, four banks across the top. Directional grades, honestly labeled as such, mapped to concrete design moves.

I took the features consumers touch most and found the seams where a better pattern was obvious and winnable.

On Accounts & Dashboard, TCB's side nav ate horizontal space a top bar wouldn't, and its right rail carried little contextual value; Marcus showed the opposite instinct — a single unmistakable balance and one or two actions.

On Payments, TCB's full-page flow made a misstep costly — fail and you lose the whole page; Chase's modal keeps the dashboard visible so users stay oriented. Transfers was the one TCB was already close on, and I said so.

On peer-to-peer, TCB had no way to save a recipient; Wells Fargo folds reusable recipients, recurring payments, and clear alerts into one screen — though its own screen shows the risk of too many competing CTAs.

On system status, TCB's homepage offered a lot of information but competing CTAs buried the guidance and any status but "Messages" vanished; the leaders use hierarchy. Distinguishing pending from posted is a small distinction with an outsized effect on trust. On errors, all three competitors state a bad username or password — but Chase and Wells Fargo bring the fix into the message; TCB names the problem and stops.

Every heuristic closed on concrete moves, not vibes: consolidate navigation, cut clutter, make status and speed front-of-mind, write errors that carry the fix, empower customization, make help searchable. And I framed the whole thing honestly — a month isn't enough to prove all of it with primary research, so I called it an evaluation grounded in real competitive evidence, clear about what I knew versus inferred.

The evaluation fed directly into the kickoff and gave the room a shared, evidence-based picture of where the experience stood and where it could go. Two things stuck. In early-stage strategy work, the deliverable is alignment, and a rigorous, well-designed audit is one of the most powerful tools I know for creating it. And the highest-leverage moment in a big transformation is often the smallest one: the room where everyone finally agrees on the problem.

See the full case study → https://design-case-studies.vercel.app/texas-capital-bank