Ed Chen

Lead designer across five product lines at an ASIC-regulated broker, working directly with the CEO, CFO, Legal, and three engineering teams. I built a 150+ component system where teams ship without coming back to me for every edge case — and it has absorbed 8 regulatory rewrites at 3–5 days each, against the 3–4 week rebuilds that came before.

Built for durability: the system survived 8 regulatory updates, 3 engineering-team changes, and expansion to 40+ countries — the return on designing for governance, not aesthetics.

Why it matters for regulated fintech: the same component rules covered onboarding, trading, funding, disclosure, and internal operations. That gave product, legal, and engineering one shared control layer instead of five separate UX rulebooks.

Sole designer and product owner for Christie's International Real Estate editorial platform — 9 months, five global offices, $5M–$80M property buyers. I handled design, development, and stakeholder coordination end-to-end. The challenge: translating 260 years of print brand standards into a digital product without compromising a single weight, colour, or whitespace ratio.

The product work: turn an editorial brand into an operating system for brokers, markets, and luxury-property buyers. I rebuilt the publishing workflow, reduced page query load from 47 to 18 queries, and kept the digital surface aligned with Christie's print-grade brand discipline.

Why it matters for luxury real estate: the platform had to support editorial storytelling, broker trust, market discovery, and high-value lead intent without making the experience feel like a generic property portal.

Designed the documentation system and credential infrastructure for ACY's institutional FIX 4.4 API — the industry-standard trading protocol connecting prime brokers, liquidity providers, and institutional clients. Five different types of users (from product managers to market data engineers) all need to understand the same system differently. I designed that experience. This later became the protocol foundation for TradeX.

The target: self-serve integration — a hedge-fund engineer goes from first API key to production order flow without a support ticket. Integration time fell from 3 weeks to 1 week; support tickets dropped 67%.

Why it matters for institutional finance: the design problem was not visual polish; it was reducing ambiguity in authentication, market-data subscriptions, order-routing messages, and production readiness for teams that cannot afford trial-and-error onboarding.

Trading analytics platform handling 1,000+ real-time data points. I designed a modular widget system so traders could arrange their workspace the way they actually think — not the way a product manager assumed they should. A controlled within-subjects study with 15 active traders measured time-to-insight at 4.2s → 2.5s — 40% faster (p<0.001) — and order placement at 8.2s → 2.9s in a companion lab study. 67% built custom layouts within 3 months (platform analytics, Q4 2023).

The research behind it: a paired within-subjects test (n=15, t(14)=8.92, p<0.001) confirmed the 4.2s→2.5s time-to-insight gain was real, not noise. The more useful finding was which steps caused the delay — confirmation modal and instrument search — and that drove the redesign, not the headline number. Full limits at the methodology note.

Why it matters for trading analytics: the product changed from a fixed dashboard into a trader-configurable workspace, where layout, symbol search, alerts, and market context could follow the user's strategy rather than a default product hierarchy.