JP Morgan × F1 Miami

The Formula 1 Miami Grand Prix had become one of the fastest-growing sporting events globally — generating $350 million in local economic impact at its 2022 debut. The event's audience profile is exceptional: high-income, tech-early-adopter, globally mobile, Gen Z and millennial-skewed. This made Miami GP not just a sporting event but an ideal test lab for future commerce technology.

JP Morgan Payments had a strategic mandate: demonstrate that biometric authentication and seamless physical-digital payment integration could work at scale under real-world pressure. F1 Miami was chosen because it represented the hardest version of the problem — high-volume, time-pressured, high-visibility, zero tolerance for friction or failure.

The UX brief was not "design a kiosk." It was: design the interactions that make a novel, unproven payment experience feel effortless to a consumer who has never used it before — in a noisy, crowded, time-pressured stadium environment.

Business problem: JP Morgan needed a promotional experience that could operate at F1 scale — high volume, variable staffing, multiple device configurations — without degrading the brand's premium perception. The activation was also, implicitly, a live demonstration of JP Morgan's digital payments capabilities. Poor UX would undermine both the commercial activation and the technology's credibility.

User problem: Event attendees are time-constrained, context-distracted, and have near-zero tolerance for complexity. Self-navigation had to be genuinely intuitive — not "intuitive with training."

Design complexity: Three distinct interaction contexts existed simultaneously:
- Try-on kiosk — standing, large-format display for AR product exploration
- Vending machine kiosk — final gift distribution point
- Controller interface — for a PR representative to assist customers remotely
- Self-service touchscreen — full unassisted navigation (selected as the final solution)

Four form factors. Four use cases. One coherent design system.

Title: UX/UI Designer
Owned: Digital experience design across all device formats, navigation logic, interaction design for each scenario, visual design within JP Morgan brand standards.
Collaborated with: QReal product team, JP Morgan brand stakeholders, event operations team.

I was responsible for designing the full interaction logic across all form factors — from AR try-on discovery through to product selection and delivery flow — while navigating the tension between JP Morgan's premium brand standards, QReal's AR capabilities, and event operations' practical constraints.

Decision: Self-service over staffed. Multiple navigation options were prototyped. The critical strategic decision was eliminating dependency on human assistance for the primary user flow. Staffing is a variable; technology consistency is not. If the experience required a PR person to guide users through it, quality became a function of that person's performance on a given day, under event pressure. The final solution — a full self-service touchscreen — removed that variable and guaranteed consistent experience quality at scale.

Designing for event-scale attention. In a 55,000-person stadium environment, visual noise is constant and cognitive load is high. The UX hierarchy was compressed to the minimum viable steps: see the product, try it on, confirm selection, collect gift. Every screen designed for 3-meter legibility, single-touch interaction, zero ambiguity. No onboarding. No tutorial. No explanation required.

Form factor coherence. A user could begin on the AR try-on kiosk (standing), transition to a touchscreen for selection (touch), and complete at the vending machine (physical). The UX had to maintain visual coherence and logical continuity across three physically distinct environments. This required a shared design system across all form factors — not three separate designs for three devices.

JP Morgan brand compliance under hostile conditions. Large-format brand activations are where visual identity gets stress-tested. JP Morgan's standards are precise. Working within those constraints while designing for AR functionality, variable outdoor lighting, and physical kiosk hardware limitations required constant negotiation between brand fidelity and operational reality.

The final deployed experience was a self-service touchscreen kiosk system enabling: full unassisted customer navigation from discovery to gift collection · AR try-on integration at point of discovery · seamless JP Morgan brand experience consistent with premium positioning · zero-instruction-required UX designed for maximum distraction and time pressure.

The solution was trusted with 55,000 potential interactions at one of the highest-profile sporting events in the world.

Confirmed (JP Morgan Payments / F1 Miami GP / PYMNTS / Stadium Tech Report):
- 100% of biometric transactions authenticated and processed successfully in the 2023 pilot
- JP Morgan expanded the deployment to cover all merchandise store checkout lanes in 2024
- The activation is publicly documented by JP Morgan Payments, F1 Miami GP, and PYMNTS as a landmark in stadium commerce technology

Inferred / directional:
At a 55,000-capacity event, even a 5–10% interaction rate means thousands of individual kiosk engagements over race weekend. The decision to expand in 2024 is the clearest possible validation signal: a financial institution at the scale of JP Morgan does not expand a pilot that underperformed. The "zero support required" UX outcome implies a task completion rate well above the threshold required to justify self-service deployment.

This project clarified something important about designing for high-stakes physical environments: every step removed from the user flow is a risk removed from the deployment. The instinct to add features, add options, add personalization, has to be actively resisted when the environment is maximally unfavorable to cognitive engagement.

Operating at the intersection of JP Morgan's brand standards, QReal's AR constraints, and event operations' practical realities also required a level of stakeholder navigation that goes beyond typical design work. Making the strategic recommendation to go self-service — and having that recommendation adopted — was the most commercially significant decision I made on the project.

What this project proves: I can design for enterprise clients, under live event pressure, across multi-device environments, navigating complex stakeholder relationships — and produce a solution that gets expanded to larger scale. That is product design operating at a Director level.