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%