Transamerica
Different products. Different users. Same job: make it work. I moved between Transamerica teams, helping turn complex insurance and financial workflows into interfaces people could actually use.
This Was Consulting
At Transamerica, I wasn't responsible for one website or one product. I moved between business units and applications depending on what a team needed: understanding unfamiliar platforms, translating business requirements, and shaping screens and workflows that made sense.
The work involved policies, contract values, premiums, advisors, distributors, pending business, and payments. Sometimes I needed to map the workflow before visual design started. Other times I worked directly in the front-end code to solve a specific problem.
Core Problem
What does the user need to see? Where should it go? And how do they get from here to there without drowning in data?
Making Dense Information Easier to Use
Western Reserve Life
The application handled policy search, status, outstanding requirements, financial data, and detailed policy records. I worked on navigation that let users move from search results into the details of a policy without losing track of where they were.
Transamerica Life Canada
This work connected clients, policies, advisors, distributors, contract values, pending business, and statements. I organized the information with tabs, clear hierarchy, and data tables so users could move through a lot of information without everything competing for attention.
The challenge wasn't creating more information. It was deciding how to organize what was already there.
Before the Interface Looked Finished
A lot of my work happened before the visual design. I used workflows and wireframes to figure out what users should see first, what happened after an action, how they moved from one step to another, and where the deeper information belonged.
Some assignments stopped at workflows and wireframes. Others continued through visual design, interactive prototypes, and production front-end code.
The finished screen was important. But first, somebody had to figure out how it worked.
Making Third-Party UI Belong
Transamerica Financial Advisors (TFA) combined a public financial website with tools built for advisors. One of those tools was an external financial-market widget with a rigid vendor stylesheet that didn't match the rest of the site.
I didn't want the widget to look like something pasted in from another website. I used jQuery to work around the vendor's DOM and styling, adding my own classes so I could control the typography, spacing, data display, and brand colors and make it feel like part of TFA.
S.T.A.R.S. Award Recipient
That work earned one of two S.T.A.R.S. awards I received while at Transamerica. It wasn't the biggest project I worked on there, but it was a good example of something I care about: if a detail looks wrong or works badly, I don't like leaving it that way.
Different Projects, Different Needs
Improving What Already Existed
Transamerica already had an internal front-end framework. There was no reason to replace everything just because I was working on it. I worked within what already existed, improving components, adding what was needed, and dealing with older code as the applications evolved.
// Not everything needs to be rebuilt.
The Interface Kept Changing
The assignments included mobile concepts, responsive interfaces, multi-step payment flows, and data dashboards. Each needed something different: tighter priorities on mobile, clear step-by-step feedback for payments, and dashboards that made important numbers easy to spot.
// The interface should fit the task, not the other way around.
One Company. Very Different Problems.
Looking back, there wasn't one Transamerica project that defined the job. The common thread was being able to move from one problem to another and get up to speed quickly.
I worked with different business units and engineering teams, learned unfamiliar financial workflows, and moved between UX, visual design, prototypes, and front-end code depending on what each assignment needed.
Walk into a complicated problem. Understand it. Solve your part well. Then be ready for the next one.