simplifying a complex trading environment
for corvil (now part of pico)
We used qualitative user research to find usability problems to help vastly improve the experience of a complex software application.
What we did: User Research, Design Sprint Workshop, Prototyping, User-Testing, Visual Design.
The Challenge
Corvil’s analytics software provides a real-time analysis of the market data flow across the entire infrastructure – from Client, through Venue to Market and back – and it does this with nanosecond precision. The data that this produces is invaluable to clients. However, it is also vast and presented at quite a detailed level making pinpointing issues across the infrastructure laborious and time-consuming.
Our challenge was to produce more simplified views that would leverage the capability of Corvil intelligence to predict issues before they became problematic, and improve the overall user experience for clients.
Our Approach
We started by conducting need-finding interviews with customers in order to better understand the Trading Persona; what tasks they need to do on a daily basis, what’s important to them, where they are blocked, how well Corvil helps them, and to uncover opportunities to improve and innovate on the existing platform.
Our Process
We ran a Google Design Sprint with the whole team using our research findings as the starting point. The rich results from our interviews gave us a deeper understanding of needs of users thereby opening up opportunities for us to develop solutions that addressed those needs. Additionally, we uncovered secondary personas who would also benefit from the product.
With the output from the workshop we created a click-through prototype to validate our solution ideas with users.
Our Solution
Once we validated the concept, we moved into the visual design phase.
The result was a more simplistic, higher-level visualisation of the data across the entire infrastructure. Any issues or potential issues (predicted – Corvil Smart Hints) are bubbled up to alert users who can then quickly drill-down to exactly where the issues lie, rather than spending hours searching tables of data.
Going through the process of user research followed by a multi-disciplinary workshop with the whole team helped us to uncover the real-world issues and understand what is most important to our users. This led to a truly innovative solution and new concepts which have the potential to become a brand new product offering.
Corvil is now part of Pico Technology Services for Financial Markets.