Mercedes McGee - Product Designer
& Creative Thinker
Action Stream - Consolidated Desktop View
Liquidnet securely connects the world’s institutional investors with a comprehensive suite of solutions encompassing liquidity sourcing techniques, advanced analytics, and alert applications. Traders come to Liquidnet seeking block opportunities - this requires real-time, as well as pre and post trade analytics to navigate market movements and opportunities in the pool.
Role | UX Workshops, Ethnographic Field Research, Interaction Design, Prototyping
Partners | CMU - Capstone Project Team, PM Lead, Dev, BI Team
We know Traders were hiding the application due to limited real estate and Liquidnet was losing opportunities to capture additional trading shares. How can we get actionable insights into Traders hands if they are closing the application except for matches and high urgency alerts?
How Might We
Win share of Traders’ attention & desktops?
Better understand users’ mindset while using Liquidnet?
Notify Traders to time-sensitive alerts?
Quickly adapt the alerts to individual needs?
UX Research & Insights:
With the help of a team from Carnegie Mellon University’s Capstone project, we gained invaluable feedback that allowed us to pinpoint the concepts and features that held the highest value for both Traders and Liquidnet relationship managers. Their research revealed insights about Liquidnet usage and confirmed some assumptions we already knew.
Leveraging the added resources from the CMU team enabled us to delve into many divergent solutions that may not have been explored.
More of their research can be found here.
CMU Team Trufflin
CMU Team Trufflin
As a Trader/Asset Manager
Must be able to communicate trade strategies and compile reports
Need to have a system gain credibility for its accuracy before they will use prompts
Want to optimize screen space - Liquidnet front-end is infrequently used
Don't want to miss out on new information or be overwhelmed with data analytics tasks
Want to seek out additional block liquidity while still keeping both sides anonymous.
Based on the success of Targeted invitations - Allowing qualifying Members who opt in to do this is in high demandTraders’ want to minimize the amount of time they have to spend searching for liquidity. Prompts like
“BBBY on your watchlist experienced recent activity, Create Order?” would be extremely valuable - but with the alerts and FE minimized they could be missed
Liquidnet Advantages & Liabilities
Liquidnet's advantage
There is a historical preference for Liquidnet, the first dark-pool
BIDS and ITG give less data to traders and smaller avg. execution size
Liquidnet has the best liquidity as the first dark-pool and has harder to trade names
Recognizable match pop-up @Mid with ability for Negotiation
Recognized industry innovation leader
with Targeted Invitations & Surge Capture specially designed order in the market for any unfilled shares immediately after an initial block executes
Liquidnet's disadvantage
Competitors have for a lower commission (cheaper trades)
Liquidnet's software is significantly more expensive and at the time there was no research offering
Pure Agency model - Limited to Trader spend (Can’t trade to pay for other services)
Competitors excel at algorithms and quick matches
Other key takeaways from the research:
Amplify High Urgency Alerts | Use high urgency alerts to prompt immediate action. Attention-grabbing alerts can be even more pronounced.
Utilize Color and Icons for Urgency | Implement a visual system using color and iconography to convey the urgency of information or alerts.
Customization and Grouping | Traders wanted greater control over their experience with the option for customization and grouping.
Dynamic Display of Importance | Ensure the platform intelligently and responsively highlights what's most important at any given moment, optimizing user volume and density of alerts.
Consolidated View Benefits | Both traders and relationship managers highly valued space-saving attribute
Actionable Alerts
An existing window dedicated to alerts provided a solid starting point for experimentation. We reimagining the alerts within the existing window to allow us to get ongoing feedback and incrementally enhance Traders’ workflows while leaving current workflows in place.
Important to note that the alerts window comes to the front for high urgency alerts
We tested prototypes with Traders and Relationship Managers, replicating the noise levels typically encountered in busy trading desks, to ensure that we could effectively cut through the clutter.
To eliminate external influences on the feedback, I oversaw training of our internal teams in interviewing techniques and procedures, ensuring that the outcomes were clear.
While the alerts were more recognizable and actionable, traders liked the density of the old alerts - we needed to optimize for both.
We also got feedback that:
We should use overflow methods to show controls/content on hover
Add the ability to copy the alert for end of day reports
Group of alert types & alert history
Add the ability to see if you took actions
With several rounds of feedback in place for this phase of the alerts, the next step was to start work on a consolidated view to gain desktop share.
Based on usage statistics and user feedback we decided to use an order monitoring system we already had in place as a basis for the consolidated view. It allowed us to add sections and get feedback while keeping the original workflows in place during adoption. We also had the benefit of prior testing of consolidated views to work off of - so we knew we were going in the right direction, or at least not the wrong direction! We provided some initial sketches of the consolidated view for the CMU team to iterate on and gather feedback.
