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Snapshot

Designing for the workflow, not the homepage.

Redesigning J.P. Morgan’s client portal markets feed, and finding out mid-project that the homepage wasn’t where the work lived.

Client
J.P. Morgan
Sector
Capital Markets
Role
Senior UX designer
Year
2023
Status
Launched December 2023
A trading workspace: FX spot prices across the main column, an execution blotter beneath them, and the market feed docked in the right rail. Open the rebuilt prototype Loads here, not in a new tab
Rebuilt, not the shipped product The market colour sits in the right rail, beside the prices and the blotter, rather than on a page of its own. That is the answer this project arrived at, and it is the reason the prototype opens here instead of on a feed. Built from a written brief with no client branding, no proprietary interface and no real market content.

The problem

Market colour was abundant. Relevance was not.

Clients had access to a deep library of research and market commentary, but the experience hadn’t kept up with how they actually worked. Research surfaced two patterns: clients who wanted content brought to them, and clients who wanted to navigate to it themselves at speed. A portal that treated content as something to browse underserved both.

The constraint shaping everything was a fixed launch date on existing architecture. We were optimising for delivery certainty, so every decision carried weight on the timeline.

The calls that mattered

Three decisions defined the launch.

Personalisation anchored in stated intent. The feed was built from clients’ own research subscriptions and declared interests, not inferred from behaviour. It felt like theirs because it was made of what they had already told us mattered.

Curated and real-time, side by side. Editorially chosen Spotlight content next to a feed updating through the day. “Bring it to me” and “let me find it fast” are different habits, and neither group had to take up the other one.

Recommendation surfaces. They turned the feed into a route into the wider portal instead of a destination of its own.

The reframe

Many of our highest-frequency users never entered markets through the homepage at all. They bookmarked tools and jumped straight into execution. A redesigned homepage risked being invisible to exactly the segment we needed most.

That surfaced during discovery and it was uncomfortable, because the project was already named after the thing it questioned. Rather than absorb it quietly, I proposed alternative entry models for the next iteration, a standalone Markets Feed application in the Bloomberg mould and a feed-first surface closer to LinkedIn, and moved the conversation from how should the homepage work to where should market colour actually live to match how clients work.

It didn’t change the v1 launch, and it wasn’t meant to. The date was fixed and the architecture was set. It shaped the roadmap that came after.

Two models for where market colour lives In the asked-for model the client lands on a homepage holding market colour, then navigates out to the tools. In the model the research pointed to, the client lands straight in the workspace and market colour sits in a rail beside the tools they came for. The brief Client arrives Homepage market colour lives here The tools where work happens most users skipped ahead What the research pointed to Client arrives The tools where work happens Market colour in the rail nothing to skip
Where should market colour actually live The brief asked how the homepage should work. The research kept answering a different question. Both models were on the table by the end of discovery, and the second one is what the prototype above is built as.

What testing told us

A few months before launch we tested against the highest-risk assumptions. Three findings landed, and none of them were comfortable.

Pinning behaviour was disrupted. Users expected to pin applications and reach frequent tools quickly. In the new experience pinning was harder to find and the affordance unclear. A small feature, mission critical for repeat users.

The homepage didn’t match the mental model. Users didn’t naturally treat it as the place to digest market colour, and navigated away to find what they expected.

Homepage bypass was real. Testing confirmed what discovery had hinted at, which meant the reframe hadn’t been a hunch.

These findings didn’t stop the launch, and I wouldn’t argue they should have. They set the iteration priorities and they strengthened the case for the alternative entry models, which is the more useful outcome of testing something you cannot yet change.

What happened

The Markets Feed launched in December 2023 to a selected user group, with the three design decisions intact.

The reframe had the longer life. Naming where the work actually happened, rather than defending the surface I’d been asked to redesign, is the part of this project I’d point at.

The optimised client journey map: accessing the portal, content engagement, and application discovery, with user objectives under each step.
The real artefact, as it shipped The journey map for the launched design, exported from the project file. It describes the homepage-centric model, because that is what v1 was: a landing page holding market colour, with application discovery downstream of it. Worth reading against the diagram above, which is where the work went next.

There is more here than a snapshot holds. The full journey mapping and the component specs behind the feed are worth a longer conversation.

Ask me about it →