(Role: Visual Design Lead: 2 People. Principle Designer.)

After the economic downturn of late 2008, a leading international bank that survived the tumult with flying colors saw an opportunity to expand into new markets, both geographic and strategic. They contracted Roundarch to investigate their existing FX and Fi trading platform and to recommend an entirely new/more streamlined approach, one with extensibility, ease of use and speed at the forefront.

In the world of finance, aesthetics and experience tend to take a back seat to lowest-common-denominator simple interfaces. The challenge with this project was to educate the client that the two actually intersect – that successful interfaces are ones that are easy on the eyes over long periods of time and conform to well established usability standards. Therefore they afford fewer mistakes than the stereotypical dense trading screens of light-text-on-dark backgrounds. In the end the user-experience, design and technological implementation are inextricably linked.

This project’s audience isn’t large institutional banks or algorithmic traders (who play by a different set of rules), it is small to medium sized individuals and institutions. With them, it is far more important to be holistically sound than penetratingly brilliant. Meaning: we were building an agile, quick vehicle that you could take to the grocery store rather than an Indy Car.

We began with the premise that their design problem could be solved with a smarter, more clever interface – we didn’t necessarily need more pixels. From there we devised a modular workspace concept that could accept any number of component inputs. This was important because the context under which the user looks for financial instruments is critical. Whether searching for a specific client request, running strategy comparisons or conforming to workflows dictated by specific user-roles, quickly assembling relevant functional components on-screen, altering their view and efficiently switching to an entirely new one were integral to the success of this project.

To round-out this new paradigm’s efficiency for the user, we have designed the more fine-detailed tasks to be controlled by keystrokes in addition to mouse inputs. We felt in order to fully sell this concept through with the client we needed something more than just a smart interface hook. We needed to go back to our research and draw on successful paradigms from other competitors and luminaries in the space. Enter hot-key navigation a la the Bloomberg Terminal.

As of this writing this project and features are still under production and the entire project, client name and any specifics like imagery are under NDA. Once the project launches and the NDA expires, I will post more on the results and what good ideas (if any) got lost on the cutting room floor.