MegaHub PowerTicker Enhancement
SynerWealth Financial Limited is a company in Hong Kong Exchange participant and in 2018 acquired services from MegaHub to provide them with a market terminal that suite their business model from ultra-low latency trading systems to comprehensive strategic analysis systems. PowerTicker, the current market terminal from MegaHub would require an overhaul to suit the needs of SynerWealth and the first task was redesigning multiple modules in the terminal to match the trading behaviors of Synerwealth’s traders.
The Problem
To improve on existing modules including CBBC/Warrant Module, Teletext, Watchlist and more to meet the requirements of professional traders.
Background
One key aspects of a successful traders is to know what information to ignore
It is very common to see stock traders using multiple monitors to have all their tools opened at the same time. Some programs might be for checking the market prices while others would be placing the actual order. With so many programs trying to grab the attention of the user, it is vital for a platform to have a high customisation ability
Efficiency and speed is key in low latency trading
SynerWealth competitive edge against other regular trading platform is they have a direct line to the Hong Kong Exchange and its customers can leverage the low latency to execute order that regular platform cannot. MegaHub’s PowerTicker’s tools are outdated and require an update.
The Challenge
The enhanced version of PowerTicker must suit SynerWealth’s traders trading behaviour and help them elevate their skills to the next level. SynerWealth uses multiple market terminals their users have a lot of feedbacks and suggestions on how to improve on those platforms. An initial task in enhancing the PowerTicker terminal was understanding the trader’s trading behaviour, their pain points from using their current platforms, and potentially introduce tools to improve their trading experience.
The Process
As an UXUI designer on the project, my responsibility included taking part in requirements gathering, determining enhancements to implement, iterative prototyping, testing and performing UI review on the deliverables.
Research: Work alongside product owner and end user to understand user behaviours and goals
Strategy: Work with BA and project manager to determine business goals, gather product requirements and determine the priority of each enhancements based on its impact on user experience.
Wireframing: Create iterative solutions through exploring user flows and interaction patterns
Visual Exploration: Design ideation and explore visual designs for different modules
Prototyping and Refine: Conduct usability testing and refine solution based on user feedback
Implementation: Assist developers and perform UI review to ensure design intent is being met
Contextual inquiry
As part of the discovery process, me and the product owner visited SynerWealth’s trading department to get an understanding of their trading process and the systems that they use to complete a trade, specifically on how they use a market terminal. I performed interviews with several of their traders and observe their process during the open hours of the market. Interviews were consolidated into individual points and given a score in terms of how major the users think that problem/suggestion is collectively. This helped us gather valuable insights about the pain points that the users are currently experiencing and what modules need the most improvements.
Competitor Analysis
SynerWealth traders have an existing list of system that they use to monitor the market and place trades. It was useful to perform a competitive study on those systems to understand how traders used them and if there were any existing behaviours that our enhancements need to follow.
SP Trader
One of the mostly used platform by local traders to quote prices in the options market.
Have a very simple UI that emphasis speed and stability of the platform more than anything else
Futu
An emerging trading platform that have a strong focus on providing good user experience
Very strong at information visualisation. Each module’s information are supplemented with graphs and charts that help user understand the data more easily and quickly
AA Stocks
Many older generation of traders start their trading career using terminal from AA Stocks, therefore are being very familiar with its functions and layouts
The layout is very standard with a heavy emphasis on displaying many types of information all at once
Trading View
Simple design with a heavy focus on charting
The social trading aspects helps to bring a lot of attention to the platform and users with high loyalty factor.
Information are presented very clearly while allowing advance users to explore
Define
With a better understanding of the user’s currency journey and landscape, personas and user journeys were created based on user habits and preferences. The aim was to turn our understanding of the client into insights, opportunities, and to later propose suggestion for improvement to provide a better experience to our user. By consolidating the information collected during the discover phase, a list of pain points and solution was created to prioritise the ideas based on desirability and feasibility.
Sketches and Wireframes
During the design stage, meetings were held regular with the users to discuss their ideal market terminal and to obtain feedback for every changes we make to the terminal. In this phase hand sketches and low fidelity UI were regularly used during discussion with users.
We introduce new features such as a CBBC/warrant calculator, sorting/filtering functions to all table based modules, as well as some new teletext templates to name a few. The CBBC calculator solve the issue where traders cannot quickly value if the investment product is priced correctly, where else the sorting and filtering function help traders to further narrow down the list of correctly priced products so they can choose which to invest in.
Prototyping
For some complex modules such as portfolio backtesting, I created paper prototyped to perform usability tests before moving on medium fidelity UI. While with other modules that have smaller enhancements, they were developed by IT team and sent out to customers as UAT versions to collect feedback and data for the next round of comments. Every several months, traders were invited to our office to give comments and brainstorm features that they would like seeing on the platform. And it was based on their feedback that we continue to apply enhancements to the PowerTicker market terminal to suit their needs.
Deliverables
For each enhancement, after the functional specification and UI are confirmed with SynerWealth, I would create the high fidelity UI with specifications and pass them to the development team. IT teams would then develop the module and I would perform an initial UI review before pushing the update to the users. The development cycle would then repeats itself as users provide their feedback and comments based on the latest modifications.
Project Learnings
Contextual inquiry is a very good supplement to user interview
Sometime user cannot truly describe in detail their daily interaction with a platform. Observing the user in their environment first hand can help the researcher in picking out those pain points that user cannot describe clearly during an interview.Discussing an idea using prototypes built from medium fidelity UI saves large amount of development time
It is much easier for user to understand the proposed flow if they can actually interact with the buttons and see the interface actually change according to their actions. And collecting opinions from user as early as possible saves time from designers and developer by minimising changes as development become more complex at the later stages.