Morgan Stanley

Research | Wealth Management | Investment Banking

About Morgan Stanley

Morgan Stanley is a global financial services firm offering investment banking, wealth management, and investment management services to businesses, governments, and individuals worldwide.

Role

As a UX Leader at Morgan Stanley, I provided high-level strategic leadership that shaped the user experience vision across multiple products and platforms. I guided my team and the organization toward a more user-centric, data-driven, and forward-thinking approach to design, ensuring that every solution met user needs and advanced key business objectives.

Responsibilities

  • Strategic Leadership: Set and communicated a long-term UX vision, influencing product roadmaps and digital transformation initiatives at the executive level. 

  • Team Building & Mentorship: Built and guided a high-performing, multidisciplinary UX team, empowering designers through structured career paths, shared best practices, and a unified design language.

  • Cross-Functional Alignment: Collaborated closely with product, engineering, and analytics leads to ensure that user insights shaped strategic roadmaps, streamlined development cycles, and improved overall delivery.

  • Design Systems & Accessibility: Established scalable design systems that enhanced consistency, brand integrity, and operational efficiency while embedding accessibility standards for inclusive, compliant user experiences.

  • Measurable Impact: Set clear UX KPIs, monitored performance, and communicated measurable improvements—validating UX as a critical driver of business growth, user satisfaction, and long-term innovation.

Leveraging Design Thinking to Empower Product Owners in Clearly Defining the Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

Approach: From Insight to Implementation

User Research & Discovery:

I began by conducting stakeholder interviews, user surveys, and usability studies. These sessions clarified pain points and identified opportunities for each product:

  • AskResearch: Users struggled to navigate complex queries and parse large volumes of research efficiently.

  • Research Portal: Clients needed a more intuitive way to discover, sort, and save essential insights from a massive research library.

  • Public Appearance Tool: Internal teams required streamlined features to track analysts’ external engagements, ensuring accuracy and easy cross-referencing.

Image: A snapshot of notes from a user feedback session.

Caption: Synthesizing qualitative insights to inform product direction and IA structures.

Design Thinking Workshops:

I led interactive sessions bringing together cross-functional stakeholders to co-create journey maps and identify key user flows. These workshops aligned everyone on target outcomes—speedy insight discovery, clearer navigation, and effortless cross-product consistency.

Caption: Using design thinking exercises to build consensus around user priorities and improvement areas.

Information Architecture & Interaction Models:

Working with my team, I restructured IA and interaction patterns to deliver intuitive navigation and quick access to relevant content. For example:

  • AskResearch: Introduced advanced filters and contextual helpers, cutting down search times.

  • Research Portal: Created streamlined category groupings and personalized dashboards, improving content discoverability.

  • Public Appearance Tool: Refined user flows to locate and update public appearance data more efficiently, reducing manual overhead.

Prototyping & Iteration:

We translated these concepts into interactive prototypes, validating their effectiveness with user testing. Rapid feedback loops allowed us to refine workflows, evolve visual hierarchies, and ensure consistent user experiences across products before full implementation.

Image: Mid-fidelity prototype screens in Figma.

Caption: Iterative prototyping informed by continuous user feedback to refine interactions and layouts.

Design Systems & Accessibility:

I oversaw the development of a unified design system, ensuring aesthetic and functional consistency. Components and guidelines streamlined the design and development processes, while WCAG-compliant accessibility measures broadened usability and trust:

  • Consistent UI patterns across AskResearch, Research Portal, and Public Appearance Tool.

  • Clear typography, color contrasts, and ARIA labels ensured all users, regardless of ability, could navigate with ease.

Integrating AskResearch AI into the Apple iMessage app on iOS

AskResearch ChatBot, AI and Group Chat integration into Research Portal