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Market Research Made Easy

A Systematic Redesign

Finance Data

Information Hierarchy

Workflow Analysis

The Client: Big 4 Canadian Bank [kept anonymous by client request]

My Role: Lead UX Designer | Agency | Team of 3 designers, dev lead, QA, product owners

The Problem:

Client's research platform had grown unevenly, investors would experience confusing legacy pages alongside newly built tools. Investors couldn't find what existed, and the bank couldn't surface the value of what it offered.

The Solution:

Designed a centralized research hub that organizes fragmented tools into one progressive experience, surfacing the right resources at the right moment for investors at any level.

Evaluated all research tools & links to singular “research hub”
Provided relevant & contextual information to action items
Updated all legacy research pages to current brand guidelines

Personalizing the Landing Experience

Investors don't all start in the same place, so the landing experience doesn't treat them like they do. Users land on a personalized research feed built from their holdings, watchlists, and recent activity, ensuring every visit starts with information that's immediately relevant to them.

My Holdings Wrapped, a proprietary video format developed in-house, gives investors a Spotify Wrapped-style summary of their portfolio performance, offering an engaging alternative to static data for less experienced investors
Holdings-aware alerts flag when a top holding is making significant moves, with direct action items (Buy, Sell, Set Alert, Add to Watchlist) inline, reducing the steps between insight and decision

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Navigating as an Expert

The information architecture is designed to funnel investors, novice or expert, directly to where they need to be. Rather than presenting everything at once, the hub uses progressive disclosure to let users go as deep as they choose.

Global Markets Wrapped delivers a quick video digest for users who prefer a faster format
Trending topics surface what other investors are actively trading, adding social context to individual decision-making & helps investors diversify their portfolio

The dual-landing approach, one page for global market context, one for personal holdings, was a deliberate IA decision to serve both novice and power users without compromising either experience. Allowing users to enter the research hub with 2 different mental models, 1 singular experience.

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Strategic UX Decision

Mobile: News Tab

Mobile: Investing Ideas

Mobile: Reports & Commentary Tab

Mobile: Market Research Snapshot

Process Snapshot

This project ran across three separate phases over multiple years, each stopped due to shifting priorities, funding constraints, or team resourcing before finally reaching completion. Working within that level of ambiguity required as much organizational navigation as it did design thinking.

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Audited the bank's entire research ecosystem; cataloguing every page, tool, and content type to understand what existed, what overlapped, and what investors couldn't find. The platform had evolved without a system, and the gaps were significant.
Conducted stakeholder interviews with PMs, financial advisors, and compliance to align on constraints, supplemented by analytics review to identify low-engagement pages. Collected OKR’s, North Stars, & created a full creative brief with timelines, expectations, MVP, ideal state, dependencies, etc.
User Mental Model while Resarching:
- Bottom-Up Researchers (52%) — come to the platform to confirm outside research and place trades
- Top-Down Researchers (48%) — visit looking for inspiration and new investment ideas
Key design principles that drove the work:
- Progressive disclosure: Give investors a clear overview first, let them drill down when ready
- Contextual promotion: Surface tools and services at the moments they're most relevant, not as interruptions
- Personalization: Connect global market data to an investor's actual holdings to make research feel actionable, not abstract
Client’s Pain Point: The bank was losing on three fronts: tools went undiscovered, investors weren't being inspired to engage more deeply with their portfolios, and the platform wasn't effectively promoting the services that drove revenue.

Trader’s Pain Point: Regardless of investing experience, current [CLIENT] traders had a difficult time discovering and navigating the research pages. Some users expressed that they lacked confidence when viewing the legacy pages. Because of the legacy style, users thought the data was stale; preventing them from taking immediate action or going to competitors for their research needs.
- 34% of clients said it was not easy to find information
- 46% of clients were not satisfied with the research experience
- Over 50% had never used the Investors Toolkit due to lack of depth
Roles & Responsibilities:
- Site mapping & information architecture: Conducted a full audit of the existing research ecosystem, cataloguing every page, tool, and content type to understand what existed, what was redundant, and what was missing entirely
- Information hierarchy & content organization: Analyzed how investors actually moved through research workflows and restructured the flow to match their mental models, not the bank's internal org chart
- Asset Management: Maintained communication with project managers, developers, financial advisors, & legal to guarantee product feasibility and designs adhered to Canadian regulations
- Design direction & brand alignment: Ensured all design decisions were grounded in the bank's newly updated brand guidelines, translating a fresh visual identity into a complex, data-heavy product context
- Stakeholder communication: Maintained design continuity across multiple restarts, re-onboarding new stakeholders each time while preserving the strategic rationale behind key decisions
Designs were completed and approved after years of stops and starts. The project reached sign-off for the first time across all three iterations. Though the platform launched after my departure, the full design system and IA framework were handed off and ready for build.
Successfully Delivered:
- Increase research sessions from 5% to 10% of total platform sessions
- Grow research users from 7% to 15% of active users
- Increase "Add to Watchlist" events by 100%, from 17,000 to 35,000
- Increase average time on research pages from 4:24 to 6 minutes per session
- Reduce exit rate from research pages from 11% to 8%

Influencing Strategy

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As an exercise to determine the most viewed data, all research touching pages were collected along side the hit rates for each page. Site maps were also created to heuristically evaluate how users currently interact with the pages to determine a strategic plan to surface invisible pages.

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Comparing Old v. New:

An example of how drastic some of the client’s legacy pages are compared to the new design brand guideline. Left is the old legacy version of the News page while right is the new designs.

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