Solving Complex Problems
Brokerage-as-a-Service | 2021-2024
My Role:
- Lead designer responsible for all new brokerage products and features launched on their internal operational dashboard and retail user client portal
- Lead multiple concurrent design initiatives across the organization including but not limited to creating a new design system, redesigning platform, launching new trade-able Product asset types, migrating to T+1 settlement cycle, enabling trading features such as extended hours fractional trading, cancel & rebill and more...
- Deliver new Option trading core capabilities along with an end-to-end investor experience from options enrollment to expiring options liquidation
Due to NDA, all information and IP presented are public information.
The Problem
How do we improve the internal operational platform to be more user-friendly and scalable, so that we can create a one-stop shop and source of truth to support Partners to run their business operations, and make informed business decisions?
Challenges I faced:
- Being the first full-time UX hire means setting the design foundations and processes to help integrate design into the organization's workflow
- In addition, I had to build a new design system from ground up and work with developers to create a new component library
- I needed a resilient and adaptable mindset, in order to work with ever-changing business priorities, limited resources, and technical constraints
- I had to constantly build new relationships with stakeholders and customers to gain their trust and build rapport
25+
Research studies conducted
We conducted both qualitative to quantitative research to help gain a deeper understanding of brokerage and investing flows. We collaborated with our internal Operations team and power users from our Partners to delve into common challenges and identify opportunities for enhancing their experiences and workflows.
5+
workshops conducted (with over 6 participants each)
I organized and led various workshops that focus on design and product development:
- Ran research and interviews to better create a holistic design strategy for multi-asset expansion
- Worked on both the tactical aspects and envisioning the future of product design for our internal platform
- Collaborated with various business stakeholders in the design process
- Created user personas and mapped out user journeys to enhance the user experience
Prototypes play a critical role in the design process. They help us visualize and concept test our ideas before committing to a final design, ensuring that we create the best possible product for our users. Prototypes also help to gain alignment with business stakeholders, users, and developers. We often identify design/experience issues before moving to development, which saved the company the risk of wasting development time and resources.
20
newly designed components added to design system
When I first joined, I built the first design system from ground up, and worked with developers to create a shared component library. We gathered feedback from users to continously improve each design component. Over the years, I partnered extensively with our design team to expand the design system to include over 20 new design components. The new improved design system with new components promote faster UI turnaround. This in turn raised the quality and efficiency of our work through a new design system.
25+
Development sprints completed
Our design activities front-run a development sprint by 1+ sprints, so all research and dev-ready designs are completed before we work closely with developers to ensure design to development consistency and a speedy delivery of an iterative product experience. We successfully delivered a lot of high impact features in an agile fashion.
Having been in a developer shoes before, I am able to communicate more clearly with developers and understand technical constraints and collaborate more effectively with developers.
As we redesigned each page, we made sure to conduct user research to understand what works best for our users. This helped us improve the functionality and user interface based on solid research findings. Additionally, we worked on reducing our reliance on outdated libraries, which not only decreased technical debt but also addressed security concerns.
4
Investor experience demos
In order to better communicate and illustrate complex brokerage workflows and capabilities, I worked with the Product Sales engineers to deliver end-to-end UX demos of high-impact features such as extended hour equities trading, multi-currency conversions, HSA and Options trading. These deliverables were used as a marketing tool in the sales process to demonstrate the full range of capabilities we offered.
I eneded up playing a critical role as a UX designer, web designer and front-end developer and saved the company $6k a year instead of outsourcing brand website enhancements.
Consistently produced quality work under minimal supervision even without a direct manager for six months. Additionally, I managed one in-house designer and five design consultants and their work streams across different products.
3
New tradeable asset types launched
I was the Design Lead in launching these new tradeable asset classes including Options Trading, Mutual Funds, and Fixed Income. I worked closely with stakeholders and the Product Managers to capture requirements, and create designs that require collaboration with the backend engineers from the API side, and front-end developers to enable access to these workflows within the internal portals.
6+
Dashboard widgets designed
Based on user research and feedback, we designed several permission-controlled dashboard widgets with data visualization and custom controls.
2
minutes time to onboard
I worked on a new developer experience and self-service onboarding features that helped reduce time to integration to under 2 minutes.
