Role: VP UX Designer, JP Morgan
Improving risk operations through user-centred design
$1tn
70+
The challenge
The platform had evolved organically without dedicated design support. Features had been delivered successfully, but usability, navigation and interaction patterns had developed independently across different areas of the product. This created several challenges:
Inconsistent experiences across critical workflows
Limited visibility of user needs during prioritisation
Design being brought in late, often after requirements had already been defined
No established UX process, handover or QA framework
Limited shared understanding of UX across the wider team
Difficulty connecting usability issues to roadmap decisions
The approach
Building design capability
The first priority was creating the foundations needed for design to contribute effectively across a large, established delivery team. Rather than introducing heavy process, the focus was on making design easier to understand, easier to adopt and more useful to product and engineering teams. This included:
UX and UI introduction sessions
Design Thinking and Double Diamond training
Figma and Balsamiq training for stakeholders and developers
Regular UX/UI drop-in sessions
Design-to-development handover processes
Design QA practices
Triage processes for incoming design work
Updates to Jira workflows and definition of done
The aim was not to slow teams down with process. It was to help teams make better decisions earlier, reduce rework and create more space to focus on user needs.
Establishing ways of working
To make design sustainable, the team needed clearer ways of working across product, business analysis and engineering.
New processes created more visibility around design work and helped teams understand when and how to involve UX. This included regular check-ins, drop-in sessions, Confluence tracking, design handover, post-build checks and feedback loops for iteration.
These changes helped move design from an ad hoc support function to a more integrated part of delivery. They also gave teams practical routes to ask for support, review ideas and collaborate before solutions were already committed.
Understanding the platform
Once design had been embedded into delivery, the next step was understanding the product itself. Together with another designer, I conducted a large-scale heuristic evaluation across eight critical user journeys. The platform supported complex workflows for financial professionals, so the evaluation needed to look beyond individual screens and consider navigation, information architecture, terminology, workflow efficiency and consistency across related journeys.
The evaluation identified approximately 60 usability issues across areas including:
Interface inconsistency
Information architecture
Outdated toolkit usage
Navigation
Terminology
Workflow clarity
Interaction patterns
The objective was not simply to produce an audit. It was to create a shared understanding of where investment would have the greatest impact for users and the business.
Turning findings into a roadmap
The evaluation findings were grouped, prioritised and translated into actionable opportunities.
Issues were organised into themes using affinity mapping, then converted into problem statements and recommendations. From there, opportunities were split into two tracks:
Quick wins: Lower-effort improvements that could be sized with engineering and added directly into the backlog.
Longer-term opportunities: Larger areas requiring further design exploration, stakeholder alignment or deeper product thinking.
An impact versus effort matrix helped prioritise the work and turn usability issues into a practical roadmap for improvement. This was the point where the work became more than a design review. It created a bridge between user needs, product priorities and delivery planning.
Influencing product direction
The recommendations gained visibility beyond the immediate product team. The report was presented to senior stakeholder groups and shared across wider product communities. Quick wins were accepted into the development backlog, and the highest-priority issues began moving into delivery. More importantly, the work helped shift the wider team’s mindset.
Design became less about producing screens at the end of a process and more about helping teams understand problems, shape opportunities and make better product decisions earlier. The work helped create stronger conversations around:
User needs
Product prioritisation
Cross-team collaboration
Experience quality
Design standards
Roadmap planning
The impact
The work established design as a core capability within a large product organisation and helped create a more structured approach to customer experience improvement.
Team impact
Embedded UX within a 70+ person delivery organisation
Introduced UX processes across handover, QA, triage and collaboration
Increased design maturity across product, business analysis and engineering teams
Created regular routes for teams to access UX support
Helped teams involve design earlier in problem-solving and planning
Product impact
Reviewed 8 critical journeys
Identified approximately 60 usability issues
Created a prioritised roadmap of quick wins and longer-term opportunities
Improved visibility of customer experience issues across the platform
Connected usability improvements to roadmap and backlog decisions
Organisational impact
Presented recommendations to senior stakeholder groups
Shared findings with 300+ employees
Secured adoption of quick-win recommendations into delivery backlogs
Helped shift the organisation towards more user-centred product decision-making
Established design as a partner in solving problems, not just delivering requirements
