Financial Platform
Client: Goldman Sachs · Role Senior UXD · Launched 2019·
Goldman's financial cloud platform sold access to institutional-grade datasets — but to try a free dataset, new users had to email sales and wait up to two weeks.
Complaints were climbing, and the sales team was spending hours a week on access requests that didn't need human error. I was brought in to fix the complaints problem, but the real problem was upstream.
Problem
I was asked to reduce complaint volume. After mapping the onboarding service end-to-end with my PM and tech lead, it was clear the complaints were a symptom: access was gated by internal process rather than user qualification. Reducing complaints meant redesigning the service.
Reframing the problem
The service blueprint surfaced a question no one had asked: which access requests actually need a human? Most didn't — they needed identity verification, a consent record, and a routing rule. Sales involvement was a blocker, not a requirement.
This reframe is what unlocked the project: once the team accepted that the human step was optional for a defined class of users, the design work moved toward something shippable.
Design Sprint
I facilitated a sprint with PO, PM, UXR, and engineering to test the scope. The team generated blue sky concepts — guided tours, tiered access flows, a full account portal — but I pushed for the smallest intervention that would prove the service change: a self-service modal that handled the qualifying cases and cleanly routed the rest back to sales.
Shipping small was the judgment call. A bigger flow would have taken quarters and tied the service redesign to UI risk it didn't need to carry.
A form that replaces a salesperson has to do work a form usually doesn't. I designed around three principles: ask only for the PII the access decision actually required, make the privacy and consent terms unmissable so users understood what they were agreeing to, and keep a visible path back to sales for anyone whose request fell outside the self-service path. UXR testing surfaced bugs on the first pass; we iterated and shipped.
Designing for Trust
Learnings & Outcome
Launched as the new default onboarding path for freemium datasets on Marquee..
The highest-leverage design work often isn't visible in the final UI. The modal was simple; the decision behind what the modal replaced was the actual project.
I've brought that insight — look upstream, design the service, then pick the smallest surface that makes the service real — into every platform project going forward.
Case study
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