When redesigning navigation wasn't the real problem
The BTG Pactual Bank customer support portal brought together accounts, cards, credit, and onboarding in one place. Our initial hypothesis was about visual organization. User testing proved us wrong.
Company
Role
Year
BTG Pactual Bank
Product Design Lead
2023
~35%
in escalation reduction
+2.1k
users impacted
+4
journeys delivered
01
Context
PLATFORM
One of BTG Pactual Bank's main customer support platforms
SYMPTOM
Scattered information and limited autonomy to resolve cases
GOAL
Reduce operational dependencies and make support workflows faster
BEFORE
Onboarding, transactions, cards, and loans — all in one place, all mixed together.
02
Evidence
The most common issue at Level 1 support wasn't necessarily the most critical at Level 2. The data signaled that our diagnosis needed revisiting — I just didn't know where yet.
L1 OCCURRENCES RANKING
Personal Credit
1.00x
Biometric
0.93x
Credit Limit Request
0.79x
New Card Request
0.67x
Limit Balance
0.64x
L2 OCCURRENCES RANKING
Biometric
1.00x
New Card Request
0.94x
Credit Reassessment
0.77x
Onboarding
0.66x
Refinancig
0.55x
03
The test contradicted the hypothesis
DECISION TURNING POINT
I thought the problem was finding information.
I found out the problem was acting on it.
INITIAL HYPOTHESIS
Information was scattered and lacked visual hierarchy. I believed that reorganizing the navigation would solve the problem.
WHAT TESTING REVEALED
Agents could find the information — but they didn't have the data, permissions, or actions needed to resolve cases on their own.
That shifted the direction of the project. The key findings were:
01 - Critical information had low visibility
High impact
02 - Data and actions needed for autonomous resolution were missing
High impact
Medium impact
04
Hard calls
With limited time, we chose depth over coverage.
WHAT WE LEFT BEHIND
Reduced scope — we prioritized only the journeys with the highest operational dependency
WHAT WE GAINED
Focus on the areas driving the most escalations: onboarding, cards, and financing
I reallocated three designers already working on the product to reduce onboarding time and speed up delivery.
Autonomy
Reduced scope
Prior product knowledge
Incremental delivery
05
Building a shared foundation
The project exposed another gap: there were no established standards for internal web products.
Alongside the deliverables, I defined a shared foundation of navigation patterns, layouts, and components so different teams could work with consistency.
This became a prerequisite for scaling delivery, reducing development rework, and making QA validation more predictable.
06
Solution
BEFORE
AFTER
