By Shawn Mars

Financial products are often expected to do something deceptively difficult: make highly complex systems easier to use without making them less complete.

In consumer technology, simplicity is frequently treated as an obvious design goal. Fewer steps, fewer choices, cleaner interfaces, and faster interactions are often associated with better experiences. In financial technology, however, simplicity is not always so straightforward.

Financial professionals may need to evaluate large amounts of information, compare multiple scenarios, monitor changing conditions, move through approval processes, and make decisions that carry meaningful consequences. The complexity is not necessarily a flaw in the product. Often, it comes from the work itself.

For product designer Shuchen Wang, whose career has included financial technology work at Goldman Sachs and now continues in financial services at Evercore, this distinction is central to designing professional products.

“Good design in finance is not about removing complexity,” Wang says. “It is about making complexity understandable and navigable.”

That idea challenges a common assumption about product design. The goal is not always to show less. Sometimes the more important task is to help users understand more, faster.

Complexity and Confusion Are Not the Same Thing

A complex system does not have to feel confusing.

This distinction matters in financial technology because many of the problems users encounter cannot simply be reduced to a few buttons or hidden behind a simplified interface. Professionals may genuinely need access to detailed information, multiple states, historical context, or exceptions before they can make a decision.

The designer’s job, then, is not to pretend that complexity does not exist. It is to give that complexity structure.

Information hierarchy, grouping, labeling, progressive disclosure, visual emphasis, and contextual guidance can all determine whether a dense product feels manageable or overwhelming.

“A professional user may need a large amount of information,” Wang says. “The design challenge is helping them understand what matters first, what changed, and what they need to do next.”

This creates an important difference between complexity and confusion.

Complexity may be inherent in the domain. Confusion often comes from the way information is presented.

Good product design instead creates a clear mental model around that complexity.

The user should be able to answer basic questions quickly:

What is happening?

What requires my attention?

What has changed?

What can I do next?

What are the consequences of that action?

When those answers are difficult to find, the problem is not necessarily that the financial system is too complex. It may be that the product has failed to communicate the complexity effectively.

Design Is Also the Design of Attention

Financial professionals rarely suffer from a lack of information.

More often, the challenge is determining which information deserves attention at a particular moment.

A dashboard may contain dozens of metrics. A workflow may include multiple open items. A user may receive updates, alerts, requests, and changes from several directions at once.

In these environments, attention becomes one of the most limited resources.

Product design plays an important role in deciding how that attention is directed.

The size and placement of information, the order in which items appear, the way exceptions are surfaced, the timing of a notification, and the visibility of a change can all influence what a user notices first.

“In information-heavy products, design is partly about helping users allocate attention,” Wang says. “If everything looks equally important, the product is not really helping the user make sense of the information.”

This is why adding more data does not necessarily make a financial product more informative.

A product can technically display everything and still fail to communicate what matters.

The more information a system contains, the more important hierarchy becomes.

Good design creates relationships between pieces of information. It distinguishes routine activity from exceptions, background context from immediate action, and supporting detail from the information that should influence the next decision.

The goal is not simply to reduce cognitive load. It is to help users spend cognitive effort in the right places.

Design Shapes the Environment for Decision-Making

A product designer does not make financial decisions on behalf of the user.

But design inevitably influences how decisions are made.

The order in which information appears can shape what users notice first. A default view can determine which data becomes the starting point for analysis. The visibility of historical context can influence how a current situation is interpreted. The way two options are compared can make similarities or differences easier to recognize.

Even seemingly minor choices such as labels, alerts, and status indicators can affect how confidently a user understands what is happening.

“Design does not make the decision,” Wang says. “But it shapes the environment in which the decision is made.”

This responsibility becomes particularly important in professional software because users are often making decisions under time pressure.

The product has to support fast recognition without encouraging careless action.

This creates a delicate balance.

Designers need to make routine information easy to scan while ensuring that unusual or consequential situations are difficult to overlook. They need to reduce unnecessary effort without hiding information that may change a decision.

In this sense, product design becomes part of the decision infrastructure of the organization.

It determines how information moves from raw data to something a person can understand and act upon.

Why Frictionless Is Not Always Better

Modern digital design often celebrates frictionless experiences.

The logic is easy to understand. If a user can complete an action with fewer steps, less effort, and less waiting, the experience often feels better.

But in financial products, not all friction is bad friction.

Sometimes an extra step exists for a reason.

A confirmation screen may prevent an expensive mistake. A review step may ensure that a user notices an unusual condition. A permission check may protect sensitive information. An approval process may reflect genuine organizational responsibility.

Removing every point of friction can make a product faster while also making it easier to make the wrong decision.

“The goal should not always be to make every action effortless,” Wang says. “Routine actions should be efficient, but consequential actions sometimes need to feel deliberate.”

This leads to a different design principle:

Make the right things easy, and the important things deliberate.

A well-designed professional product should distinguish between unnecessary friction and protective friction.

Unnecessary friction might include repetitive data entry, unclear navigation, redundant steps, or information that users have to search for repeatedly.

Protective friction serves another purpose. It creates a moment to review, confirm, reconsider, or escalate.

The difficulty is knowing the difference.

That requires more than visual design expertise. It requires understanding the underlying work.

Domain Knowledge Becomes Part of Design Expertise

Designing complex financial products requires designers to understand more than interface patterns.

They need to understand why a workflow exists in the first place.

What are users trying to accomplish?

Which decisions carry greater risk?

Who has authority to take a particular action?

Which pieces of information influence that action?

Where do handoffs occur?

What happens when the normal process breaks down?

Without this context, it is easy to optimize the wrong part of a product.

A designer might remove a step that appears redundant without realizing that it serves an important review function. A screen might be simplified in a way that makes it visually cleaner but removes context professionals rely on. A workflow might become faster for one user while creating additional work for another person later in the process.

“The deeper a product sits inside a professional workflow, the harder it becomes to separate design skill from domain understanding,” Wang says.

This does not mean designers need to become bankers, analysts, or financial experts themselves.

It does mean they need enough understanding of the domain to ask the right questions.

For Wang, this has been an important part of working in financial technology.

During her time at Goldman Sachs, she worked on complex, data-heavy financial products designed for professional users. Those environments required more than applying familiar UX patterns. They required understanding how users interpreted information, where complexity came from, and which parts of a workflow could be simplified without removing necessary context.

She now continues her product design career within financial services at Evercore. While the nature of the work evolves across organizations, the broader challenge remains familiar: designing products for people whose work depends on navigating complex information and making informed decisions.

That career path has reinforced her view that good financial product design begins with understanding the work itself.

Designing for Professional Users Requires a Different Mindset

Many widely accepted design principles originated in consumer technology.

Reduce the number of choices.

Minimize clicks.

Keep screens simple.

Remove friction.

Hide advanced functionality until it is needed.

These principles can be useful, but professional products often require a more nuanced interpretation.

A professional user may prefer a dense interface if it allows faster comparison across multiple data points. An additional confirmation step may be appropriate if the action carries meaningful consequences. A workflow may need to expose more states because those states represent real operational differences.

The question should not be whether the product is minimal.

The better question is whether the product helps the user understand and act.

A clean screen that hides important context can be less effective than a dense screen with strong hierarchy.

A shorter workflow can be worse than a slightly longer one if the shorter version removes an important opportunity for review.

And an interface that looks simple can still create significant cognitive effort if users have to remember information that the product could have shown them.

Professional design therefore requires moving beyond simplicity as an aesthetic goal.

The goal is clarity.

The Difference Between Simplicity and Clarity

Simplicity and clarity are often treated as interchangeable concepts, but they are not the same.

Simplicity is about how much is present.

Clarity is about how easily the user can understand what is present.

A financial product can contain a large amount of information and still be clear. It can also contain very little information and remain confusing.

This is one of the reasons Wang believes designers working in complex domains should be careful about simplifying by default.

“Sometimes the best design does not remove information,” she says. “It creates enough structure that users no longer experience that information as overwhelming.”

That structure may come from strong hierarchy, meaningful grouping, contextual explanations, recognizable patterns, or a clear separation between routine information and exceptions.

The designer’s role is to create a path through complexity.

Designing Better Decisions

As financial systems continue to evolve, products will likely contain more data, more functionality, and more interconnected workflows, not less.

That makes the role of product design increasingly significant.

Organizations already have enormous amounts of information. The harder challenge is helping professionals determine what deserves attention, understand what that information means, and act on it appropriately.

In this environment, the value of design extends beyond usability.

It influences how quickly professionals can understand a situation.

It affects whether important changes are noticed.

It determines whether routine work feels manageable.

And it shapes the environment in which decisions are ultimately made.

For Wang, that is what makes designing for financial technology fundamentally different from simply making complex software look simpler.

“Good design in finance is not about hiding complexity,” she says. “It is about giving people a clear way through it.”

The strongest financial products may not be those that remove the most information or reduce every workflow to the fewest possible steps. They may be the ones that understand complexity well enough to organize it around the needs of the people making decisions.

In financial technology, simplicity can be useful.

But clarity is essential.

Learn more about Shuchen Wang’s background and product design work through her professional portfolio. Additional information about her career and experience is available on LinkedIn.