Investment bankers must continuously watch and hedge their positions against market risk. At JPMorgan, this is done with very sophisticated, very ugly risk management tools.

The bank had decided to offer subscriber access to the underlying market data. This would let external clients run the same powerful risk analytics used by our own traders. But these tools had never been designed for clients. They weren't user friendly, efficient, or delightful. To make this into a sellable product, we'd need to start from scratch.

Our job, working with a large team of devs and quants, was to completely reshape these tools into a cohesive, streamlined, user-friendly, visually attractive product. It would be a massive, multi-year undertaking, with many obstacles. Eventually, it would be a pretty huge win for our team. But first, we would spend countless hours talking to clients, learning how their derivatives hedging use cases were totally different from ours. We'd also have to learn what a "derivative" was. I was an art major, by the way. And now I can explain options greeks to you, in detail.

Here's the JPMorgan landing page for this product, with a bit more info.

To learn more about the role I played, please drop me a line.

Hum is a cool Verizon product that turns any car into a smart car. You just plug in a little sensor (it goes under the steering wheel on any car made after 1997) and you have onboard diagnostics, vehicle tracking, safety alerts and more.

This was V2 of this product. We helped to add several new features - such as navigation and driver safety score - but more importantly, we dramatically improved the UX and UI. After our update, the iOS App Store rating went from 2.5 to 4.5 stars!

We also did in-store customer interviews, which is how I learned that parents are absolutely terrified of their teenagers behind a wheel. They loved that with this product, they could track them.

Here's a fun commercial showing off the parking locator feature.

Visiting Citibank.com had become a complex and overwhelming experience to users. The navigation was inconsistent from page to page, the IA was confusing, and the UI was outdated.

My team's task: a complete redesign of Citibank.com. Entirely new navigation and IA, an updated, mobile-first UI, and vastly simplified content. It took us one year, working onsite with the client, and included extensive customer research and testing.

I'm proud to say that the work we did is now live on Citibank.com. You can learn more about the integral role I played by clicking the PDF below.

This ad changed laws.

MyRichUncle was competing against much larger lenders, in a corrupt industry. We had better rates, but there were all these sneaky ways the schools and lenders could conspire to screw the students. Some of them were illegal. But we couldn’t just say, “Sallie Mae bribed your school!” It was complicated and technical.

My challenge was to read and understand a ton of flibbidybibbidy financial jargon, then translate it into normal people words, in an ad that everybody would notice and understand, but nobody could sue us over.

We came up with this “Checklist” concept, which was also sneaky. We’re not SAYING any of these claims are true, we’re just not saying they’re NOT true, you know? Then we put it a two-page spread in every national newspaper.

This and others we made were credited with helping to bring national attention to the issue. The NY Attorney General took notice, and launched an investigation. That lead to new state and federal laws, aimed at reforming the student loan industry. Those laws are still in place. Also, I like this piece because it got hate mail from banks.

Can't read puny graphic? HULK SMASHes open the PDF below!