FIELD NOTES · INSTITUTIONAL FINANCE DESIGN & PORTFOLIO ENGINEERING · PUBLISHED MONTHLY

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. Four notes on client work (FIX 4.4, MiFID II, ASIC RG 268, KYC / AML), one on how I read AWStats and fix funnels on my own site, and four 2026-05-18 honesty-disclosure notes (Finlogix methodology, ACY post-launch iteration, accessibility audit, ACY Connect enterprise-IT political skill) that document what is measured, what is not, and what would change running it today.

9 notes · latest first

All field notes

2026-05-18 · Enterprise-IT political skill · ACY Connect 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, the three design moves that earned adoption by being verification surfaces (field-mapping reference doc, session-health page with real-time heartbeat, onboarding sequence mapped to his playbook). The turn at month nine. Read note → 2026-05-18 · Post-launch evidence · ACY RG 268 Post-Launch Iteration — ACY Cross-Border Disclosure 18 Months In Three versions of the ASIC RG 268 disclosure surface over 18 months. v1 modal failure at month 3 (muscle-memory dismissal). v2 strip eye-tracking-banded-out. v3 contextual inline at order time, stable through month 18. The metric I expected to lift that never did. Read note → 2026-05-18 · Accessibility · Honest disclosure Accessibility Evidence — What Is Measured vs What Needs User Testing Twelve token contrast pairs measured. ARIA discipline + keyboard navigation patterns documented. Six limits named (no commissioned audit, no real screen-reader user testing, no automated a11y in CI, etc.). Six-component replication plan with audit-cost estimates. Read note → 2026-05-18 · Methodology disclosure · Cohen's d Finlogix Methodology Disclosure for Cohen's d = 2.47 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. Read note → 2026-05-11 · Portfolio engineering · Funnel analysis 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 — a first-screen CTA, a sidebar nav link, and a dedicated bridge section — repositioned a 156-entry catalog page as a feeder to four case studies. Read note → 2026-04-18 · KYC · AML · Onboarding 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. Read note → 2026-04-15 · ASIC · Cross-border disclosure 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. Read note → 2026-04-08 · MiFID II · Best execution 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. Read note → 2026-04-01 · FIX protocol · Institutional trading 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. Read note →

By topic

The five notes group into three discipline clusters. Pick by what you are actively dealing with.

Cluster 01 · Regulatory UX (3 notes)

How regulation becomes a product input

Each note shows a specific regulatory obligation translated into a shipped UI pattern. The regulation drives the design constraint; the design carries the regulator's intent into every render.

Cluster 02 · Institutional Trading (1 note)

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 entirely.

Cluster 03 · Portfolio Engineering (1 note)

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.

Suggested reading order

If you are reviewing this portfolio for a senior product design role, here are three reading paths sorted by how much time you have:

  1. 8 min Start with Reading AWStats Like a Product Manager — the meta-discipline note. Shows how I read analytics on my own site with product-manager rigor. Read this first if you want to know whether I think like a senior PD before reading the client work.
  2. 25 min Pair the funnel note with one regulatory note that matches your stack. Buy-side PMs: read MiFID II Best-Execution. Cross-border retail brokers: read ASIC RG 268. Onboarding and compliance teams: read KYC EDD. Institutional execution desks: read FIX 4.4 Latency.
  3. 90 min Read all eight. They cover the breadth — regulatory translation, institutional execution, onboarding conversion, post-launch iteration evidence, accessibility audit honesty, methodology disclosure on a Cohen’s d number, and portfolio engineering as a discipline. Then read Compliance Approach and Data Verification for the methodology pages they reference. That’s the full body of practitioner writing on edwson.com.
  4. 30 min · senior-PD honesty pack The three 2026-05-18 disclosure notes as a set. ACY Post-Launch Iteration is the ship-and-stay evidence. Accessibility Audit is the what-is-measured-vs-not-measured disclosure for the WCAG 2.1 AA claim. Finlogix Methodology is the experimental-design disclosure for the Cohen’s d = 2.47 number. Read in this order: post-launch first (the most applicable to a hiring decision), then methodology (the most rigorous), then accessibility (the most measurable). These three together are the senior-PD honesty register the rest of the portfolio leans on.

Why field notes

Case studies do one job — they prove a body of work exists and it shipped. They are the wrong shape for a different job: showing how a practitioner thinks through a specific regulatory or execution problem when 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 of the 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 reviewing portfolios see two kinds of designers: designers who shipped product, and designers who can articulate why and how they shipped product. Showing the meta-work — funnel analysis, JSON-LD discipline, surgical fixes — is part of articulating 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 active drafting. Order will depend on which is most useful at the moment a recruiter asks.

  • Methodology Design-as-Governance — A Working Definition A direct statement of 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. Roughly 2,000 words.
  • Methodology Reading a Regulator's Notice — Extracting Design Requirements from Legal Text The actual 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.
  • Institutional craft Tabular Numerals + Density — Typography for Trader Surfaces Why monospace digits, why tabular figures, why 9.5px micro-text is OK at a Bloomberg-class density, why most trader UIs ignore this and pay the cost. Concrete OpenType feature flags and the design tokens.

Subscribe

Three ways to follow as new notes ship:

  • Atom feed Add https://edwson.com/feed.xml to any RSS reader (Feedly, NetNewsWire, Reeder, Inoreader, Mastodon, etc.). New notes appear automatically — typically within hours of publish.
  • LinkedIn Follow ed-chen-saas on LinkedIn. Each note ships as a long-form post excerpt with the link to the full version here.
  • Email Send a one-line message to ed@edwson.com with the subject "Subscribe to Field Notes" — I will email a link when each new one ships. No newsletter platform, no tracking pixels.

About the author

Ed Chen is a Senior Product Designer, specialising in institutional finance and regulated platform UX.

Four years at ACY 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

Where to go next