–
A new platform for trading in bulk
TradingScreen (now TS Imagine) is a New York based company offering multiple SaaS trading applications from portfolio management to real-time risk solutions.
CHALLENGE
The current desktop application falls short as it offers trading in “bulk” rather than in a “basket”. The tech and design are old and make it really hard to market it. The goal was to design a new flexible and customisable basket trading system that fits with the traders day-to-day workflow.
MY ROLE
I was the lead designer on the project working side by side with a Service designer. We worked collaboratively with the team of PMs and developers from TradingScreen.
Defining the UX propositionBetter understand the problem to agree on MVP direction
We went a week to NY where we ran a discovery workshop with different stakeholders from tech to business heads.
Some of the UX activities we did and why
Detailed journey mapping
The previous tool was very complicated and hard to understand. This exercise was key to highlight what the focus areas for the project, as we were limited in time and scope. It also helped us propose a simplified concept for it.
Defining criteria for success
Goals in briefs are sometimes too generic. This exercice helped the stakeholders to prioritise what matter the most at the end of the project, for the business and design.
Better understanding traders
Empathy maps helped us better understand how traders think and feel. Also important was to help stakeholders prioritise which users we needed to focus on and why they were more important. This would help us streamline the design for MVP.
DISCOVERY
Main learnings
There are four stages that a trader loops around during the day. It all depends on what stage of the day they are in.
Basket trading involves the buying or selling of a large group of securities simultaneously. Investors use basket trading to keep the proportions of their portfolios the same as money comes in to or out of a fund.
An asset manager is a type of trader who executes trades in a much more subservient fashion while a normal trader manages only a basket of trades, by deciding on how to execute different orders.
EXPLORATION
Designing the new concept of baskets proved to be the biggest challenge
From discovery, we found that Asset managers in particularly needed a way to have bird-eye view of the progress of their baskets. Wether it was checking overall trading balance, to see how well trades were executing or even latest liquidity evolution.
We couldn’t have it all in such a small space as we knew there could be more than 10 baskets at a time. The solution we found was to create baskets rows of 4 cards each that could changed during the day depending on the workflow. This way there could be multiple baskets on screen while allowing some flexibility for traders different preferences.
"I need to be able to identify hard orders and outlier trades so that I can deal with them in a timely manner"
Asset manager
Component library