Project 

Project date: 2013

 

Dow Jones Financial Services and The Wall Street Journal wanted to team up to deliver an innovative solution for traders.

 

Challenges

• Could we design and build a web-based solution that would be near real-time to serve as a compliment or alternative to the defacto Bloomberg terminal?

• Could browsers' support the demand for speed and configurablity that we would need?

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Approach

 

Understand

• Hired an external agency to source and conduct focus group interview with Traders

• Contextual Inquiry

 

Key findings

• We needed the ability to support multiple monitors

• Modules needed to be configurable with content within the platform while supporting adjacent external content across all of those monitors. We also needed the ability to save those configurations while removing the complexity of configuration because traders did not generally configure their systems

• Traders leverage multiple monitors with various sources of news and data

• Traders looked for signals across their various data sources leveraging scale, color, animation, sounds, and alerts. At times it seemed chaotic but the trader has learned to digest all of those inputs to make educated decisions on when to buy, hold, or sell.

 

Parallel approach between design and prototyping some of the more challenging aspects.

 

Ideate

• We started with on overall inventor of what we would need to tackle

• 1-week design sprints: Monday kickoff, Thursday design review Friday deliver

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Prototype

• There were a number of things that need to be proved out from a technical standpoint.

  • Supporting multiple monitors​

  • Easy to no configuration and remembering users last state