Morgan Stanley is one of the world’s largest and most well-known financial services firms. UX team was hired to design the user experience (UX) for a new application used by bond traders and sales representatives on the trading floor. This application was crucial for capturing bond quote requests from client calls, enabling sales reps and traders to communicate bond prices quickly and efficiently in a fast-paced, high-pressure environment.
Note: The data in these screen designs is fictional for confidentiality reasons.
Services
User research, Prototyping
Improve communication
Implement methods for communicating while making critical decisions.
Streamline task completion
Optimize workflows for traders to analyze and complete quote requests.
Reduce need of disparate apps
Integrate data from other applications to aid in decisions and order completion.
Purpose of our research
Using various research studies, we aimed to:
Studies
We observed users on the trading floor who sit at a desk with 4-8 computer monitors in front of them. They are constantly interacting with multiple disparate apps, talking on phone headsets, speaking into intercoms, and often standing up and shouting things back and forth to each other.
We designed a bond quoting system that enabled sales reps to communicate quickly with traders without having to shout or be on the phone. The chat feature is optimized for quick messaging with built-in responses and instant notifications to ensure quick decision-making while capturing bond prices for future data mining purposes.
With the chaotic, fast-paced environment users work in, every second counts. To help minimize cognitive load we streamlined the new application by designing a clean, intuitive interface. Clear visual hierarchy and quick access to essential tools help traders access critical data to make decisions.
Without shadowing users, we would not have learned how they did or did not perform specific tasks and how they all performed them differently. At the end of our shadowing sessions, we provided Morgan Stanley with recommendations for improving some of their processes to increase employee productivity. Ultimately, Morgan Stanley made Business Process Optimization changes so its trading room floor could focus on critical tasks without distraction.
The only true way to understand the needs of these users was to get in the trenches with them and spend a few days on their chaotic trading room floor. There simply would not have been any other way to design a UX for users in this high-energy, multi-tasking work environment. Accordingly, this UX needed to be as efficient as standing up and shouting across the floor for a quote — with the added benefit of capturing the quote data for future data mining purposes.
Through several iterations of wireframes and visual design prototypes, we delivered a UX that the users quickly developed, deployed, and adapted as part of their daily processes.
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