Field Notes
Practitioner writing on trading, compliance and regulated-platform UX — plus the meta-discipline of running this portfolio as a product. Shorter than a case study, longer than a tweet: one problem, the pattern I landed on, and the ones I rejected.
All nine field notes.
Four notes on regulatory UX (MiFID II, ASIC RG 268, KYC / AML), one on institutional execution at FIX 4.4 latency, one on portfolio engineering, and a four-note honesty register documenting what is measured, what is not, and what would change running it today. Filter by what is on your desk.
Designing for the User Who Didn't Want My Software
Twelve institutional FIX 4.4 onboardings, one IT director who didn't want to migrate. His three credible objections, and the three design moves that earned adoption by being verification surfaces — a field-mapping reference doc, a session-health page with real-time heartbeat, an onboarding sequence mapped to his playbook. The turn at month nine.
Post-Launch Iteration — ACY Cross-Border Disclosure, 18 Months In
Three versions of the ASIC RG 268 disclosure surface over 18 months. A v1 modal failure at month 3 (muscle-memory dismissal); a v2 strip that eye-tracking banded out; a v3 contextual inline at order time, stable through month 18 — and the metric I expected to lift that never did.
Accessibility Evidence — What Is Measured vs What Needs User Testing
Twelve token contrast pairs measured. ARIA discipline and keyboard-navigation patterns documented. Six limits named honestly — no commissioned audit, no real screen-reader user testing, no automated a11y in CI — with a six-component replication plan and audit-cost estimates.
Finlogix Methodology Disclosure for Cohen's d = 2.47
A paired within-subjects t-test (n = 15, t(14) = 8.92, p < 0.001) on the order-placement task. Seven limits named, eight replication directions specified. Section 5 reconciles the inconsistency with the "90-day pooled-SD" framing in other portfolio strings.
Reading AWStats Like a Product Manager
My second-most-visited page had an 84.6% exit rate. The AWStats data showed exactly where the funnel leaked. Three surgical fixes repositioned a 156-entry catalog page as a feeder to four case studies — the meta-discipline of running a portfolio as a product.
Why KYC Drop-Off Spikes at EDD
The baseline KYC funnel works. Enhanced Due Diligence is where it falls apart. The fix is not to shorten a regulatory requirement — it is to change how the questions are presented.
ASIC RG 268 Cross-Border Disclosure — Three UX Patterns
ASIC RG 268 requires retail clients to see jurisdiction-specific disclosures before each transaction. Three patterns keep recurring. One of them wins in production almost every time.
Designing MiFID II Best-Execution Reports for Buy-Side PMs
MiFID II Article 27 forces firms to prove best execution. The default output is a PDF nobody reads. Here is what a portfolio manager actually needs on the screen.
Why FIX 4.4 Latency Dictates Order Entry Form Design
When an order ticket has a 10ms round-trip budget, the whole form-design playbook you learned from consumer apps goes in the bin. At ACY Securities I spent four years inside that disorientation.
No notes in this cluster yet.
Four discipline clusters.
The nine notes group into four clusters. Pick by what you are actively dealing with.
How regulation becomes a product input
Each note translates a specific regulatory obligation into a shipped UI pattern. The regulation drives the constraint; the design carries the regulator's intent into every render.
- MiFID II Best-Execution Reports for Buy-Side PMsArticle 27 · RTS 27/28 · 9 min
- ASIC RG 268 Cross-Border Disclosure — Three UX PatternsAFSL 403863 · meaningful engagement · 8 min
- Why KYC Drop-Off Spikes at EDDFinCEN · FATF Rec 10 · 7 min
- Post-Launch Iteration — ACY RG 268, 18 Months InLongitudinal disclosure evidence · ~10 min
Designing at FIX 4.4 latency
When the round-trip budget is 8–12ms, consumer UX patterns are a latency tax. The institutional alternative is a different design playbook — and a different kind of user to win over.
Treating my own portfolio as a product
The meta-track. AWStats funnel analysis on edwson.com, applied with the same epistemic discipline I use for client A/B tests — falsifiability commitment in writing.
What is measured, and what is not
The senior-PD disclosure set. For every headline claim — an effect size, a WCAG grade, an 18-month result — a note on the method behind it and the limits it can't cross.
- Finlogix Methodology Disclosure for Cohen's d = 2.47n=15 · t(14)=8.92 · ~11 min
- ACY Post-Launch Iteration — 18 Months Inship-and-stay evidence · ~10 min
- Accessibility Evidence — Measured vs Needs TestingWCAG 2.1 AA disclosure · ~9 min
- Designing for the User Who Didn't Want My Softwareenterprise-IT political skill · ~10 min
Three reading paths, by time on hand.
Reviewing this portfolio for a senior product-design role? Pick a path by how much time you have.
Start with Reading AWStats Like a Product Manager — the meta-discipline note. Read this first if you want to know whether I think like a senior PD before reading the client work.
Pair the funnel note with one regulatory note that matches you. Buy-side PMs: MiFID II Best-Execution. Cross-border retail brokers: ASIC RG 268. Onboarding teams: KYC EDD. Execution desks: FIX 4.4 Latency.
The 2026-05-18 disclosure notes as a set. Read Post-Launch Iteration first (most applicable to a hiring decision), then Finlogix Methodology (most rigorous), then Accessibility Audit (most measurable). Together they are the honesty register the rest of the portfolio leans on.
The full breadth — regulatory translation, institutional execution, onboarding conversion, post-launch evidence, accessibility honesty, methodology disclosure, and portfolio engineering. Then read Compliance Approach and Data Verification for the methodology pages they reference.
The shape a case study can't take.
Case studies do one job — they prove a body of work exists and shipped. They are the wrong shape for a different job: showing how a practitioner thinks through a specific regulatory or execution problem while it is actively on the desk. Field notes are that shape. One problem, 800–2,200 words, with the pattern I landed on and the ones I rejected.
Most notes are about client work — FIX latency, MiFID II best-ex, ASIC disclosure, KYC EDD. One is different: it is about this portfolio itself, and how I read AWStats on my own site the way I would read a product-analytics dashboard. Hiring managers see two kinds of designers — those who shipped product, and those who can articulate why and how they shipped it. Showing the meta-work is part of the second.
The audience is other practitioners — hiring managers, design directors and engineers at institutional-finance firms who want to know whether the person writing understands the domain deeply enough to argue about it in a review.
What is on the desk next.
Three note topics in progress. Order depends on which is most useful the moment a recruiter asks.
Design-as-Governance — A Working Definition
What "design-as-governance" actually means in practice, beyond a slogan — the disclosure render event, the audit trail, the precondition gate; what shipped at ACY versus the methodology document. ~2,000 words.
Reading a Regulator's Notice — Extracting Design Requirements from Legal Text
The skill that makes a designer's voice carry weight in compliance reviews. Picking apart an ASIC notice, an ESMA consultation or a MAS circular — how to spot the operative clause versus the framing.
Tabular Numerals + Density — Typography for Trader Surfaces
Why monospace digits, why tabular figures, why 9.5px micro-text is fine at institutional-grade density — and why most trader UIs ignore this and pay the cost. Concrete OpenType flags and the design tokens.
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Ed Chen is a Senior Product Designer specialising in institutional finance and regulated-platform UX.
The ten-year career arc Securities — an ASIC-regulated broker (AFSL 403863) — designing trading, KYC and compliance surfaces for 100K+ traders across 40+ jurisdictions with $2B+ daily volume. Architect of a 150-component design system that absorbed eight regulatory rewrites (MiFID II, ASIC RG 268, FCA COBS, FINRA) without a rebuild cycle. Currently also building PawsRoam — a B2B2C pet-services marketplace in Tokyo, founded May 2025.
MFA Digital Design & Multimedia and BFA Industrial & Product Design, Academy of Art University, San Francisco. Awwwards Nominee 2024. Open-source maintainer of ReactOmega.
Full bio · For recruiters & hiring teams · LinkedIn · ed@edwson.com