A CRM for the Equity Buy and Sell Side

Daily challenges

Before any sketch or personal research, I sat down with the product manager, the Head of the equity, two analyst and a trader to talk about their job, the challenges, the pros and the cons, which shed the light on what users needs to face everyday.

Trading floor

We were granted access to the trading floor so I immediately took the chance and planned for UX techniques to better understand the finance world.

To achieve that I used contextual enquiries and ethnographic research to understand the actual user flow and imagine how an alternative could be integrated into their daily routine.

The average Equity person

The results from the observations make me understand that Users that works in finance are technical, goal driven, with a very little time to loose during the working day.

They are also very adaptable in overcoming the problems they find using the different financial softwares (average of 5 per user), creating bespoke workflows with various tools to compensate what their softwares couldn't provide.

Research

I partnered up with the Product Manager to create a clear overview of the user and business needs before delving into the project, we started with a competitive analysis to understand the market, and than I led the UX research by doing contextual enquires and leading focus groups.

Competitive Analysis

To approach this huge project I had to select a UX strategy that helps me get data and KPIs before starting the analysis of the problems. I believed that each component of data had to be aggregated, enhanced, analysed and personalised to discover actual problems into the different flows of users. This started with competitor analysis and task analysis on competitor's software to understand values and problems and decide red routes of development.

I had to learn how to use a couple of financial platform to create the competitor analysis document, and brokers helped me understand & use with confidence the specific vocabulary these stakeholders use on daily basis.

Contextual Enquiries

Thanks to contextual Enquiries we were able to have a full immersion in the users’ world and understand properly the complex and deeply fast working day of a trader. Then we asked a few users to answer questions for the most intricated workflows to understand better the single steps of each one's process.

Focus Group

After the contextual enquiries me and the PM took around 8 people and we went through the main step during they workflow of everyday life. Then we compared 7 different workflows to see if there were something missing or something in common that overlaps different tasks. For example the life of a desk leader is different from another broker not responsible for the desk.

The chief may have to be away from the desk during meetings for quite a long time during the day and is less interested in following every second the news and chatting with the guys to close trades. So the chief is interested in an overview of his colleagues, while keeping track of the behaviour and decisions of his team, and on the other hand the broker need just to take care of his clients.

Deliverables

We had to present deliverables and choices to the board to show how the project was evolving and to aligning with evolving business needs such as the request of integrating it with their blotter and OMS.

Personas

After competitor analysis and ethnographic research, I started to develop personas that will have been our target users during the development of the platform, to help the business being more strategy oriented in catering to each audience, internalize the customer that we were trying to attract, and relate to them as real human beings.

The results from the persona clustering and development results in the definition of 7 main stakeholder for both buyer and sell side: broker, dealer, analyst, portfolio manager, desk leader, investor, client.

We focused on the 3 more important: broker, investor, desk leader.

Scenario

With the development of personas I've also developed scenarios based on the personas and the red routes, to create real working situations and understand main user flows that the product should have improved.

Idea generation

With the documentation from the research in one hand, and a bunch of rough ideas in the other, we had 10 days of idea generation & quick tests for validation thanks to paper prototyping and Wizard Of Oz Technique.

We print out personas and stick them on the wall to always have the real users "into the room", we used moodboards to get inspirations and ideas from various fields, Brainwriting to generate a high number of solutions for the main problems we were trying to solve in the first iteration and affinity diagrams to organize and interpret the data from the sessions.

Information Architecture

To help demonstrate the operability of the ideas and before start wireframing we create a functionality map of the system and we realized that the best way to achive a product that was scalable, user based and intelligent enough to adapt to different tasks was to create small products that acted as a team when delivered together, a framework for the financial world.

Split Release into Features

With a lot to do and a strict timeline the product manager split the relase phase into three steps

Phase 1 (Core products):

• CRM
• Alerts
• Charts

Phase 2 (Third party integration):

• Calendar
• Messaging
• Note Builder
• Widget Library

Phase 3 (Desk leader specific):

• Screening
• Dashboard
• Technicals

Each product has been structured to work as a stand alone product as well as integrated with s.m.ar.t. suite when bounded together. I had to develop Information Architecture and prototype functionalities for each one, basically working on 10 different sub-projects, each one with its own complexities and different user flows.

Wireframes

To help demonstrate some of the UI solutions suggested as next step from the UX audit conducted, I put together several focused greybox and wireframe deliverables to supplement the audit's findings and recommendations.

With the architecture set, I set out to design the layout and information of key pages to these flows, keeping in mind the flexibility needed for both the variety of products sold and the need of a responsive framework.

Iteration

I started to produce wireframe and iterate them on a weekly basis, working 2-3 days per products, testing solutions with client, team and developers.

With the architecture set, I set out to design the layout and information of key pages to these flows, keeping in mind the flexibility needed for both the variety of products sold and the need of a responsive framework.

MVP

After the first 8 months SMART Phase 1 was ready to be tested with the Equity desk and I jumped into the production of the UI and documentation for the development team.

Because of the scale of the project, I initially created 2 style guides and I prototype the key components of the system using both, to allow test and decisions. We select the best one with the client according to the current status quo in the financial system and on some quick test on readability and satisfaction of the user.

The MVP's development was an intensive phase of design exploration and refinement where we prioritized core functionalities that our tests and prototypes had validated, focusing on an intuitive conversational interface that anticipates and responds to user needs.

Lean UX and Iterations

After getting feedbacks from the first early adopters I test a few users on functionalities and on our main areas on intervention, evaluating the KPI we set at the beginnign of the project against this new product (Easyest of contacting a client and talk of his/her portfolio/watchlist, easyeast of managing portfolios/watchlist, time spent in creating a report, etc..).

From this point on, I had both developed new products for the next planned phases as long as iterating the products we already developed with the clients and the team.

Bloomberg vs SMART

To evaluate satisfaction of the current version we tested 8 users asked to use Bloomberg and then SMART to accomplish specific tasks like visualise my clients, visualise a single entity chart, a multi entity chart, add a stock to a portfolio, edit a portfolio, see related news to a specific stock, see overview of a stock, create a note and send it to client, see last client contacted by the team.

After this tasks we asked the users to fulfill a survey aimed to evaluate perceived engagement with the system (satisfaction, NPS and perceived ease of use).