How, as a UX designer, do you redesign an entire user interface platform without disrupting the workflow of hundreds of thousands of financial professionals?
When people think of UI design, they often think of what an application looks like. For the Bloomberg UX team, UI design involves not only the visual design, but also the interaction with the application and its UI framework. And for the Bloomberg Professional service, a.k.a. “the Terminal”, any enhancement to that underlying UI framework must be introduced gradually to minimize user disruption.
Why gradually? Bloomberg Professional subscribers rely on the Terminal to access and analyze data they need to make real-time decisions that impact the global financial markets. Any abrupt change to the user interface can dramatically disrupt their workflows and how they do business.
“As our customers’ workflows become more complex, we redesign our applications to accommodate them, but our UI framework, including the widgets, visualizations and other common tools used by all the apps, also needs to evolve. Too slow, and it feels like even a brand new app is stuck in the past. Too fast, and it feels like change is happening without merit,” said Eddie Ishak, the UX Design and Product Team lead for the Terminal Desktop Framework. “A perfect execution of a UI framework enhancement will not just solve a user need, but will seemingly be unchanged from a customer’s perspective.”
So when the team began the process of redesigning the Bloomberg Terminal’s Launchpad, their philosophy of “designing for the user first” was crucial to their multi-step approach.
Step 1: Prepare to change the tires on a moving car
Fundamentally, Launchpad is a user-specific arrangement of connected Bloomberg applications laid out across a multi-display desktop, allowing a user to personalize their various workflows and also share these workflows with their colleagues around the globe.
Information overload? That’s kind of the idea. Launchpad’s ability to display an immense amount of “at-a-glance” information is an essential part of Terminal subscribers’ workflows.
One way a user might use the Launchpad “view” shown above is to simultaneously monitor macro markets while also analyzing specific securities. The left side of the screen mostly shows macro market information (e.g., the Global Macro Markets heat map) while the right side of the screen is focused on select securities. Together, these two views provide a broad, comprehensive understanding of how the world is performing while also monitoring specific activity–all at a glance.
The UX team’s job was to improve the way users could customize this interface across different scenarios. However, that couldn’t be done without first updating the underlying technologies used across the system, which was done slowly and methodically to ensure stability along the way.
“With thousands of applications built upon our Launchpad infrastructure, any UX change can potentially disrupt our clients,” said Ishak. “Our continuous challenge is to ensure that no single UX enhancement is too disruptive, especially if that change also rolls back a necessary technology upgrade. Ironically, we often re-implement old quirky Terminal-specific behavior using new technology. This gives us confidence that any UX enhancements that follow will minimally impact our ongoing technology initiatives.”
Step 2: Do your research so you build the right thing
Since Launchpad is used by thousands of subscribers every day, the team needed to understand where it fits into existing user workflows. They conducted field research and data analysis with the User Research and Data Science teams to examine how clients use the interface.
This combination of qualitative and quantitative research makes the Bloomberg UX team’s approach to human-centered design truly unique. After understanding how users were using Launchpad in different contexts during various parts of their day, the team began to unpack insights within the usage data and digital analytics.
A Bloomberg UX researcher observes how an actual Terminal subscriber uses Launchpad in Bloomberg’s state-of-the-art Usability Lab.
One discovery: many subscribers use Launchpad beyond their office desktop. With the increasing use of mobile technology, Launchpad also needed to seamlessly support a user’s workflow anywhere they need to get work done—whether at their large multi-display setup at work, on a laptop at home, or on a large public display in a conference room. Thus, it was critical to remove any barriers between the customer and their data, especially while away from their desk.
“We never design for the sake of design itself,” said Ishak. “If we don’t do the user research, not only will we not solve the user’s actual problems—but we’ll risk breaking things that weren’t broken to begin with.”
Step 3: Prototype a streamlined workflow
Armed with the insights from their research, the designers worked closely with their UX prototypers and production engineers to produce a functional prototype for user testing.
“UX designers never work in a vacuum, especially here at Bloomberg,” said Ishak. “Our work is deeply collaborative, so it was crucial that the recent Launchpad technology refresh empower not only our UX designers, but also our product owners and engineers, to design and build a Terminal product that can meet any customer need.”
Step 4: Test your assumptions to make sure they work
With the prototype developed, the team recruited customers to both gather feedback on the new behavior and to objectively determine if the new solution met their needs. One by one, customers were prompted to complete a series of tasks within the Bloomberg state-of-the-art Usability Lab. Through this iterative process, the team was able to identify any misguided assumptions and design a solution to meet the actual needs of Terminal users.
A Bloomberg UX designer has a Terminal subscriber test a design prototype for the new Launchpad.
Some of the most powerful design changes are under the hood
Making a global change to a product like Launchpad is never simple. It requires deep coordination between the UX team, product leaders, engineering, as well as the salesforce. It is this slow and steady approach both to the design and its rollout that Ishak says makes it so uniquely challenging, yet very effective.
“When it comes to updating the platform, we’ve seen firm evidence that slow and steady wins the race,” said Ishak. “This can be hard for designers. We often want to work on flashy projects and sound the trumpets to show off our work. But when you acknowledge that the users’ needs come first, you understand—at your core—that change can’t occur for its own sake. In the end, Bloomberg’s approach to advancing the platform has always been to disguise the revolution within an evolution.”