Your Identity
Your name, address, phone, email, birthdate, and Social Insurance Number.
Wealthsimple Data Transparency
3dead ends before reaching the Terms
2–3/7ease score for finding the Terms in the original app
7 → 4ideas sketched, then built
2platforms: mobile and desktop
Overview
I redesigned how Wealthsimple users find and understand their legal documents, on both mobile and desktop.
Banking apps hold some of our most sensitive information, from our name and email to our social insurance number and tax records. Yet in Wealthsimple’s app, I couldn’t find the Terms of Use without a Google search.
The Problem
I compared how easy it was to reach the Terms of Service in Uber, WhatsApp, and YouTube, then picked an app with higher stakes: a bank.
Mapping the flow in Wealthsimple showed how hard it was. A user checks Profile, Settings, Personal Information, Login & Security, and every other Settings tab, hitting three dead ends before Support finally sends them to Wealthsimple’s website.
Every tester asked whether the Terms of Use were in the app at all.
They were, just very hard to find.
Some information Wealthsimple collects
Your ID and selfie
Copies of your government-issued ID, given to Wealthsimple or one of its service providers.
Linked accounts
Transactions from all your bank accounts and credit cards when you connect them through Plaid or Flinks.
Social media
Your username, email, picture, and gender if you interact with Wealthsimple’s content on socials.
AI service providers
What you type into Wealthsimple’s AI features may be processed by outside AI companies.
Service providers
Your information may go to affiliates and outside companies for identity checks, security, fraud prevention, etc.
Exploring Ideas
Based on the research I’d done on user data, I finally came to a problem statement.
How might we give users more control over their data?
I sketched seven features based on this problem:
- Security history
- Data preferences tab
- Legal tab in Settings
- Why we need your data
- “What’s new” card
- Highlight to simplify
- Key clause summary
Choosing what to build
I gave Wealthsimple users trade-off sliders to rate which ideas mattered most to them. I ended up further iterating and incorporating:
- An easier way to access legal documents
- A summary of recent changes
- A legal text simplifier
- A preferences tab to customize what data Wealthsimple takes
Testing & Iterating
On the Single Ease Question (1 = very hard, 7 = very easy), testers rated finding the Terms in the original app 2–3. Testing my mid-fidelity screens led to three changes:
- Legal → inside SettingsIt felt more natural there.
- Settings → bottom navigation barIt took too many taps to reach.
- Terms links → highlightedIn Wealthsimple’s accent colour.
Final Design
The final changes I chose:
Legal tab where users expect it
Settings now lives in the bottom navigation bar, with new Legal and Preferences tabs inside it and highlighted links to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. On desktop, Legal sits in the account menu.
What’s changed card
A recent updates card at the top of the Privacy Policy means users don’t have to reread the whole document every time it changes.
Simplified legal language tool
Users can highlight a complicated section to see a plain-language summary, so they can quickly decide whether to read it in full. In the prototype, this is a preset summary demonstrating the concept.
Why we need your data
Personal information pages now explain why Wealthsimple keeps each detail, such as tax rules requiring records for 7 years.
Credits: UI assets from Christina’s Wealthsimple Design System on Figma Community. Fonts: Futura PT and Caslon Graphique.