Streaming News App
Client: Goldman Sachs · Role Senior UXD · Launched 2019·
Goldman's research platform had a streaming commentary feature that traders used to brief clients on market-moving news. It was cluttered, hard to scan, and complaints were mounting — but the real problem wasn't the UI.
It was that the team was optimizing for engagement metrics that rewarded clutter. The redesign started with changing what we measured.
Reframing Engagement
The existing metric was click volume. It made the product look healthy, while traders were telling us they never found the streaming commentary useful.
I argued the metric was the problem: optimizing for attention had produced a feature that demanded attention instead of delivering signal. Through the jobs-to-be-done work with traders and technical partners, I pushed the team toward a metric that tracked usefulness to the trader's actual job —saved and shared commentary.
Getting that change was the pivot. The redesign followed from it.
Designing for Usability
Once the team was measuring usefulness instead of attention, the design direction changed. The new default state showed less, not more — a scannable feed a trader could triage in seconds between client calls. A selected state carried the depth.
My brainstorming work with PM and UXR focused on default-vs-selected as the core pattern, because that split was the expression of the new metric.
Testing and Iterating
We tested medium-fidelity prototypes with five traders. The most useful finding wasn't about layout — it was about which commentary types they actually re-opened, which fed directly back into the metric definition.
We iterated the design and the measurement framework in parallel through two rounds before implementation.
Learnings
The highest-leverage thing a designer can do is often change what the team is measuring, not what it's building. A good metric makes good design better; a bad metric makes good design impossible to ship.
I took the default-vs-selected pattern into subsequent mobile work, but the greater learning was about metric design — I've pushed for measurement reevaluations going forward.
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