From pixel polish to product partner.

A new terminal needed a new way of working.

As Head of UX at BitMEX, I led the redesign of the exchange trading terminal, keeping the grassroots community spirit that made BitMEX great. Underneath that redesign was a bigger job: changing how design worked with the business and with engineering.

Design was decoration, added at the last minute.

When I arrived there was one junior UX designer. Design was seen as the team that made UIs look pretty, tapped on the shoulder at the 11th hour to polish what had been built over months around what the business thought users wanted.

Requirements moved constantly, and it was taking on average three sprints for development to meet requirements and expectations.

Design it first.

I introduced a "let's design it first" policy: clear requirements extraction, design, consideration of technical constraints and validation with users, all before any code is cut.

I said no to UX handovers.

Beautiful documentation, annotated workflows, design tokens and interactive prototypes can still produce a coded result that is wildly wrong. "Here's the spec, see you in two weeks" is passing the buck.

Instead, designers work hand in glove with developers, with frequent check-ins to correct designs before they go rogue.

"Can't we just use AI?" Of course. Foundations first.

AI can speed design up, but only if the agents are trained on the right context and a human stays in the loop as a quality gate.

So we made the design system and mockups of key areas of the platform AI-ready: machine-readable, full of context and connected to code. A robust, well-documented design system and a Storybook holding component variants alongside wikis of contextual knowledge made that possible.

"Why does my trade ticket look like a hotel booking form?"

Unless you've seen an analyst or trader setup, been on a trading floor or really understand the lifecycle of a trade, you'll probably build a sparse, whitespace-heavy, best-practice hotel booking form. Those best practices come from retail users, not a fast-moving market persona where every second can mean hundreds of thousands of dollars in price movement.

So I hired designers who understood that culture and didn't need hours of explanation to see the world through a trader's eyes. Together we re-skilled the team around a new, consistent and responsive design ecosystem.

Mutual respect. Efficient delivery. Better accuracy.