Ed Chen — Field Notes

Reading AWStats Like a Product Manager

2026-05-11T00:00:00Z

My design-system-showcase page was the second-most-visited surface on edwson.com — 156 entries over the analytics period — but had an 84.6% exit rate (132 of 156 visitors left from that same page without clicking anywhere else). The page ranks well for "design system + institutional finance" searches, so first-time visitors arrived, scanned the 146-component catalog, and left without ever seeing that those components ship in production across four case studies.

The fix was not to redesign the catalog. It was to add three insertion points that bridge the page to the case-study layer — a first-screen CTA, a sidebar nav link, and a dedicated "Where this ships" section between the existing System Card and Editorial Stance. Zero regression on the existing 149 sections. Expected funnel lift: ~2× case-study click-through from this entry point.

Read the full methodology including the falsifiability commitment at edwson.com/note-portfolio-funnel-analysis.html.

Why KYC Drop-Off Spikes at EDD

2026-04-18T00:00:00Z

Standard KYC flows complete at 75-85%. The drop-off cliff lives in Enhanced Due Diligence — where the additional questions imposed on high-risk customers (PEPs, high-volume traders, certain geographies) push the completion rate to 35% in production data I have seen at three institutional firms.

The fix is not to shorten EDD — that is a regulatory floor under FinCEN 31 CFR 1010.230 and FATF Recommendation 10. The fix is three UX interventions: progressive disclosure with explicit progress, save-and-resume infrastructure backed by magic-link auth, and in-context regulatory citations that explain why each invasive question is being asked.

Read the full breakdown at edwson.com/note-kyc-drop-off-enhanced-due-diligence.html.

ASIC RG 268 Cross-Border Disclosure — Three UX Patterns

2026-04-15T00:00:00Z

ASIC Regulatory Guide 268 requires retail clients of an Australian Financial Services Licence (AFSL) holder to see jurisdiction-specific risk disclosures before each transaction. The "meaningful engagement" test is what determines whether the disclosure satisfies the regulator.

Three patterns recur across implementations: modal blocker (rejected by users and by ASIC as "click-through ritual"), persistent strip (mediocre because users habituate), and inline contextual disclosure adjacent to the trade input (winner in three A/B studies). The inline pattern shipped at ACY (AFSL 403863) survived multiple ASIC review cycles without triggering a single material finding.

Read the pattern comparison with citations at edwson.com/note-asic-rg-268-disclosure-patterns.html.

Designing MiFID II Best-Execution Reports for Buy-Side PMs

2026-04-08T00:00:00Z

MiFID II Article 27 forces firms to prove best execution. The default output is a quarterly PDF nobody reads. The data underlying that PDF — fill rates, slippage by venue, time-to-fill distributions — is exactly what a portfolio manager needs to improve execution quality, but it never reaches them in usable form.

The design fix is a three-layer screen: a policy-versus-observed compliance strip at the top (compliance officer scan), a filterable venue attribution grid in the middle (the PM's primary workspace), and a trade-level audit drawer on demand (TCA team workflow). Slippage in basis points, not currency. Time-to-fill as a distribution, not a mean.

Read the full three-layer breakdown at edwson.com/note-mifid-ii-best-execution-ux.html.

Why FIX 4.4 Latency Dictates Order Entry Form Design

2026-04-01T00:00:00Z

FIX 4.4 round-trip latency to a tier-1 venue is 8–12ms. Consumer-app safety patterns — "Are you sure?" confirmations, slow async state transitions, no keyboard shortcuts — are a latency tax that breaks institutional workflow. Trader productivity drops to a fraction of what the system can support.

Four design changes shipped at ACY Securities: pre-flight validation that runs before the FIX message is built (no round-trip on validation), reversible execution UI that allows post-fill cancellation when the venue protocol supports it (FIX 35=F), keyboard shortcuts that map to FIX tags, and a normalized reject-code taxonomy that reduced support calls by ~70% by translating venue-cryptic reject codes into actionable trader language.

Read the full design playbook at edwson.com/note-fix-latency-order-entry-design.html.