The Setup
This client, a top 5 financial firm, was trading hundreds of millions of dollars a day in interest rate derivatives, spending their time across the same handful of screens, all of which had different interaction patterns and required calling them up from different places. They asked us to bring these all together into one tidy place, so they could focus on what they were good at– identifying and acting on opportunities– and spend less time navigating and working around an inconsistent experience.
Making Sense of it All
We spent time watching traders do their thing and learned the core workflows behind identifying and acting on opportunities in the fixed income and interest rate derivatives markets. Then, we inventoried the screens they were currently using, and created a site map to structure the new space we would be building.
Interaction Design
Once we developed mindshare around the structure of the space, we combined what we’d learned about the core workflow and picked the best of the interactions we had inventoried. The result was a low-fidelity, highly interactive mockup to validate our vision for bringing everything together. We put this in front of a few users to see how well this structure would fit their workflow.
Designing the Details
The next step was to expand on the foundation we had sketched out and build out the states we would need. The line items in the blotter column, while simple at first glance, had many different permutations.
Visual Design
With the client’s existing brand guidelines and design system (which we had designed in a previous project), our visual designer worked their magic on our greyscale wireframes.
