IG Investments

Investing is inherently uncertain. The challenge was not simply enabling transactions, but helping users understand opportunities, evaluate risks and make informed decisions with confidence.

Users needed enough information to understand opportunities, compare options and feel in control of their decisions — while the product operated within strict regulatory boundaries. Every design decision sat at the intersection of usability, compliance and trust.

Investments was not a redesign.

It was an entirely new product introduced within IG's established ecosystem — built for a market that didn't yet have access to an IG investment experience. The challenge was establishing investment journeys from the ground up: defining how users discover financial instruments, evaluate opportunities, place orders and manage portfolios — all within a highly regulated environment that demanded close collaboration with compliance, legal and localisation teams from the start.

Rather than adapting existing patterns, the work involved creating new interaction models, reusable component foundations and scalable experience frameworks capable of growing alongside the product.

France was selected as the first launch market for IG Investments.

Designing for a specific national market meant more than translation. French users operate within a distinct regulatory environment governed by French financial authorities, with compliance requirements and disclosure obligations that differ materially from those in the UK. FCA-aligned patterns could not simply be transposed.

Research revealed that French investors frequently preferred interfaces built around familiar local financial language and demonstrated low tolerance for English terminology transposed into French. The risk of appearing as an imported product — rather than one designed for French users — was a real design concern that shaped decisions at every level.

Designing for confidence in this context required aligning usability, localisation, financial wording, regulatory disclosure and cultural expectations — not as sequential workstreams but as interdependent design constraints that had to be resolved simultaneously.

One of the most consequential challenges in the design process was serving two fundamentally different users inside a single product.

Novice investors arrived with limited financial knowledge, higher anxiety around decision-making and a strong need for guidance, reassurance and progressive disclosure that revealed complexity only when they were ready for it. Experienced investors arrived expecting the opposite — efficient workflows, immediate access to detailed financial information and the ability to complete investment actions without unnecessary friction.

The solution was not building two products. It was designing flexible information hierarchies and scalable interaction patterns that adapted to each user's behaviour — without degrading the experience for either audience.

Every major design decision in Investments was shaped by at least one constraint. Understanding them early — and treating them as design inputs rather than blockers — was what made it possible to ship a coherent product.

Dedicated UX researchers conducted user interviews and moderated usability sessions throughout the development of Investments.

My role was to collaborate closely with the research team — synthesising findings, identifying patterns and translating insights into product hypotheses, design concepts and testable prototypes. This was not a linear process. Research informed design, which returned to research. Prototypes were built to answer specific questions; usability sessions surfaced new ones and the design evolved in response.

The product launched publicly in France across iOS and Android, bringing together a coherent investment experience across discovery, evaluation, order placement and portfolio management.

Investments launched publicly through the IG mobile app and was accompanied by an official launch campaign across social media and marketing channels.

Investments relied on an existing design system, but evolving investment journeys occasionally required extending patterns, introducing reusable components and ensuring consistency across a growing product ecosystem.

Much of this work involved contributing to shared infrastructure rather than owning it independently — deciding when to reuse existing patterns, when to propose extensions and how to introduce new components without fragmenting the system.