Trade Armor
Trading platform concepts for advanced traders
Reinforcing the importance of managing the trade lifecycle
2012
Financial Industry, Boston & New York
Active Trader Platform Concept Demos & Workshopped Consulting Program
The client's User Experience group came to frog with strong ambitions to do some in-depth user research and concepting. The aim was to explore and define what innovative and atypical improvements could be made to thier Active Trading platform with the goal of improving usability with their current audience, as well as differentating themselves from their commensurate and feature focused competitors. The Active Trading platform is similar to Bloomberg’s trading Terminal, and is offered to traders who make 150 or more trades a year with their broker account. The platform comes in a desktop and an online version.
This project was largely focused around working hand-in-hand with the client team to teach them frog’s User Research and Design Concept approaches. The research phase alone in this program involved 50 in-home user interviews, 3 participatory design sessions, and 3 ideation workshops with the greater client company. The frog and client teams were responsible for planning all of these events, ideating and creating the materials needed, then synthesizing the research and finally developing concepts, which frog built into html prototypes for one last hands-on user research session.Highlights of what I did:
In this project I was one of the primary contributors in a 5 person design team working alongside one with of our veteran Creative Directors, and a Senior Technologist. I was the second senior title on the project.
Over the course of 3 months we created 3 interactive concept demos that were well received by the entire company and one of the concepts was approved to be included into their production pipeline to be built out for 2013.
I was involved in all three phases of the project -- discover, design, deliver. I was responsible for conducting research and interviews, co-developing the concepts, wireframing and designing the interactive and some visual aspects of the final demos.
Trade Armor, the particular concept I was heading up, was chosen by the company to fund to build into their product platform.
"The space is both an arms race filled with paranoia and impatient participants."
– Client
Generative Design Sessions
2-day frog facilitated workshop sessions with over 40 stakeholders to ideate around active trader products, and create a set of user-based design recommendations. Concept exercises were centered around 4 central themes that emerged from research synthesis.
Concept Sketches
The workshop sessions were exciting and generated many ideas worth saving and exploring, too many to cover here. But we also noticed patterns emerging that suggested some simple principles and themes for organizing our design explorations without prohibitively limiting the scope of those explorations. The five principles that follow, point to a core principle:Help the trader shift from reactive to proactive trading. The trader without an approach needs help developing that approach; the trader with an approach can benefit from becoming more aware of how well that approach works, how well they implement that approach, and how to tweak it over time.
Initial Wires
From the concepts, the frog team guided the client team to narrow the concepts down to 5 themes: Awareness, Exploration, Emulation, Automation, Socialization. Each of these had underlying design principles. From this, I led the team to create wires from the concept sketches for eah theme that supported the design principles.
Demos
The end goal of the program was to leave the client team with 5 concepts and demo scripts for them to put on display and run at multiple trader conferences and test customer appetite.
