2022 – 2023 · Role: Lead Product Designer (Contract) · Tier-1 Nigerian bank · Team: Fidelity Bank digital team · Scope: Site audit, tree-testing and navigation restructure
Context
Fidelity Bank is a tier-1 Nigerian bank; together with Signature Bank, a combined retail base in the tens of millions.
I led the team behind a complete digital overhaul of the bank’s web presence. It was not a facelift but a non-linear process with deep structural changes to how the bank communicates its services.
Challenge
Legacy fragmentation: years of feature creep made essentials like mortgage applications and corporate trade tools hard to find.
The neobank threat: a traditional bank’s storefront has to be as fast and intuitive as an agile fintech’s, or it risks losing younger customers.
Technical complexity: a platform that is modern, strong enough for high traffic, and secure and compliant.
Discovery
I audited the top 30 support tickets and ran tree-testing with 18 customers to understand what people actually came to the site to do.
People weren’t looking for banking products, they were looking for financial outcomes. We shifted the narrative from what we offer to how we help, which led to the task-based information architecture. Because most Nigerian users reach the bank on a smartphone in low-bandwidth conditions, we went mobile first.
Approach
Test the split — Several rounds of low- and high-fidelity prototyping tested different personal and business navigation splits to find the path of least resistance.
A modular design system — It let the redesign scale across hundreds of sub-pages without losing brand consistency.
Strip the clutter — A clean, white-space-heavy look lets the bank’s blue and green act as functional wayfinders.
Craft
Task-driven navigation — The public site was restructured from feature-driven to task-driven navigation, organised around customer jobs instead of the bank's product catalogue.
Account and loan flows — Redesigned Open Account and Apply for Loan to reduce clicks and form fields and lower the barrier for new customers.
Built, not just designed — I also led development: a fast, responsive front end and a secure back end that integrates with the bank’s existing services.
Clarity at density — From Sustainability to Investor Relations, every page balances high-density information with readability.
Result
The new structure cut navigation loops and gave the bank a secure, mobile-first site.
Impact
30 — Support tickets audited
18 — Customers in tree-testing
Reflection
This one was a lesson in balancing marketing, compliance and engineering in a single plan. In banking, simplicity is the hard part: the job was to make a big bank’s complexity disappear for the person using it.
Tools
Figma
Tree-testing
Information architecture
How it came together
How we found the new structure
Read the top 30 support tickets — To see what people actually came to the site for.
Tree-tested with 18 customers — To see where they looked first.
Rebuilt around tasks — Pages are organised by what people want to do.
Navigation, reorganised
Before: organised by product: Organised around the bank’s product catalogue. After: organised by task: Organised around what customers came to do.
From the process
A site map of the Fidelity Bank website, mapped in Miro.
I’m , a Senior Product Designer and Design Engineer. Ten years across fintech, healthtech, commerce and logistics, from user research to production code.
I studied graphic design, led a product design team at Alerzo, and now design and build private capital software at DealStack.
My best ideas come from where products are actually used: market stalls in Lagos and Ibadan, a fund administrator’s spreadsheets, a bank’s support queue. I turn what I find there into clear, calm systems.
Then I help build them. At DealStack I coded about 90% of our design system in React, so what ships is what was designed.
User research
Interviews, field studies, usability and tree testing. I learn from what people do, not only what they say, and turn it into product decisions.
User interviews · Usability testing · Field research · Journey mapping · Analytics
Product design and systems
End-to-end product design for complex B2B and fintech software: clear flows, sound information architecture and design systems that scale.
Interaction design · Information architecture · Design systems · Prototyping · Accessibility (WCAG 2.1)
Design engineering
I prototype and build in React and TypeScript, so designs are tested against real data and what ships matches what was designed.
Recommendations from my LinkedIn profile, from a manager, a fellow designer and the marketers I’ve shipped with.
“Ayodeji’s commitment to excellence is evident in every project he undertakes. He consistently delivers high-quality designs that exceed expectations, making him an invaluable team member.”
“Working alongside Ayo was truly inspiring. His leadership in product design, coupled with his ability to bridge design and engineering, elevates the entire team’s output.”
AAAbdul-Lateef AkinyemiSenior Product Designer
“Ayodeji is an exceptional team player who brings creativity and strategic thinking to every collaboration. His ability to translate complex problems into elegant solutions is remarkable.”
“Ayo is a creative mind who consistently pushes boundaries. His design work is not just visually stunning but strategically sound, always keeping the end user in focus.”
POPromise OsigweMarketing Communications
Beyond the day job.
Mentoring, speaking, and a few companies and products of my own.
Speaking
Tech Rise Africa, to 1,000 people. DSGN Discussions, to 400+. On design leadership, product systems and creative practice.
Companies I’ve founded, and products I build in my own time.
Empocreat (The EOC) builds digital products, brands and experiences with clarity and purpose. I founded it in 2016 and have directed creative strategy for 20+ brand and product projects across fintech, education, consumer tech and e-commerce.
MoveMoni compares exchange rates and fees across international money-transfer providers in real time, so people can see who is cheapest for their route before they send. Users save 3–5% on average on international transfers.
Clariti is a personal finance companion that helps people track spending, budget smarter and take control of their money in one simple app. It started inside MoveMoni and now stands on its own.
A free, educational world map built on the Equal Earth projection. It folds into a globe, shows what Mercator distorts, and lets you compare countries at their real size. Made for classrooms first, after the UN General Assembly voted in September 2026 to encourage equal-area maps.
Cleap turns a product’s code, database, infrastructure and integrations into one live, zoomable map, so people who build products without reading code can still see how everything fits together.
An open benchmark for one question: given a piece of code, how good is a plain-English description of it? Labels are scored on accuracy, specificity and whether someone who can’t read code would actually understand them. It grew out of Cleap and is at the scaffold stage: a seed set of samples and the scoring pipeline, with real model runs still to come.
A site map of the Fidelity Bank website, mapped in Miro.
An audit of the site’s links.
