How, as a UX designer, do you redesign an existing product or feature without disrupting the workflow of hundreds of thousands of financial professionals? Bloomberg’s product rollout cycle is a blueprint for UX-led optimization that respects your customers’ time.
Change is hard. But that’s not to say change is bad. It’s essential to growth, innovation, and customer loyalty. As our founder and CEO Michael Bloomberg says, “customers’ needs evolve and we provide what they want or lose their business.”
UX designers empathize with users – listening to those evolving needs and working to continuously improve the products and services they interact with every day. But how change is introduced to users is often as important as the change itself.
Take, for instance, the example of Snapchat in 2018. A sudden, disruptive change in the messaging platform’s user interface (UI) led to a user revolt, resulting in millions of lost users and a petition begging for a switch back to the original interface.
UX designers working on popular, market-leading products don’t just need to drive innovation – they need to manage how existing users experience those innovations. It is, in essence, the equivalent of changing tires on a moving car.
This is especially true at Bloomberg, where Bloomberg Professional Service (aka “The Terminal”) clients rely on their knowledge of the Terminal to respond with speed and precision to market conditions – making real-time decisions that impact global financial markets. Created in 1981, the Bloomberg Terminal brings together real-time data on every market, breaking news, in-depth research, powerful analytics, and communications tools in one fully integrated solution. Changes to the Terminal, however well intentioned, have the potential to interrupt established workflows and derail our clients’ businesses if not handled properly.
That’s why Bloomberg’s UX team designed an approach for rolling out enhancements and feature optimizations that puts users firmly in charge of the pace of change. Bloomberg’s product rollout cycle gently introduces product upgrades, while slowly phasing out older versions.
Do’s and Don’ts: Designing Bloomberg’s product rollout cycle
At Bloomberg, our clients’ attention is a precious commodity. So, when we think about the typical UI elements designers use to communicate product updates or draw attention to a new feature, we acknowledge our constraints and are very aware about what actually works.
Here are some things we know DO NOT work for Terminal users:
- Notifications: Our clients use multiple monitors in their workflows – meaning an on-screen notification is easily missed (or potentially disruptive).
- Pop-ups and Banners: Users often dismiss them without reading them.
- Emails: Emails only speak to what has just changed, are quickly out of date, and might never be read (or be read and forgotten) by the time a user actually uses the new feature.
Bloomberg’s 4 guidelines for rolling Out UI & product upgrades
If you’re a UX designer, product manager or someone working to find an empathetic, user-centered way to introduce a new product feature, here are four guidelines Bloomberg’s UX team recommends you follow.
Guideline #1: Start by informing users of significant changes early on
We found a persistent, yellow callout box (left) performed well for continually alerting users to change. Clicking the box takes users to a new feature “tour” page (upper right) that allows them to explore the new feature via a guided onboarding process (lower right).
Users should never be surprised by software upgrades when their work relies on that software. Our product rollout cycle is premised on a long-communication cycle that informs users change is coming as early as possible. One way we start broadcasting the change is to use a small callout on the application that invites users to try the new version. Clicking on the callout opens a window explaining the full list of changes – allowing them to upgrade if, and when, they’re ready.
Guideline #2: Empower users by giving them a generous window of time to schedule their transition
Bloomberg’s product rollout cycle is built around “gentle” change – allowing us to listen to user feedback before changes are universally applied. As you can see in the above, change is designed to rollout gradually and accommodate a client’s workflow.
Our product rollout cycle is designed to give users a large window of time to convert to a new version. We’ve found there’s no “one rule” for the ideal amount of time for a feature rollout – but that a defined process is ideal. Our process is designed to phase new versions in steadily, while slowly sunsetting/depreciating the existing version. This follows a consistent, phased switchover that gives us time to collect feedback, while ensuring users have adequate time to opt-in to scheduling the appearance of a new UI or feature set.
Due to vacations or holidays, users might miss that a change is coming – or they might not visit an application frequently enough to have prepared for the change prior to the next time they need it. In the end, it’s impossible to know for sure – so a large transition window that follows a process allows time to gather feedback and make changes before surprising a user with a new version of a product they’ve come to rely on.
Guideline #3: Popups should only be used as a last resort
The main thing we try to avoid with a new feature rollout is disruption to a client’s workflow. While notifications can come in many forms – from visual to auditory – it’s crucial that these alerts not cause undue distraction from the client’s task at hand, or that it completely halt their workflow.
A pop-up might sound like a good way to alert a user to a change but, in practice, we’ve found clients don’t read them before dismissing them. This can compound the difficulty of alerting a user to a change because it’s hard to revisit a pop-up once dismissed.
Guideline #4: When in doubt, give users the flexibility to revert back to older versions
If all else fails, go back. Users shouldn’t be forced into a change until they’re ready, and, in an ideal rollout cycle, users can revert back to a previous version if they need to. Bloomberg’s UX team eventually aims to allow users to revert to a previous version for a period of time if they so desire.
A user may accidentally opt-in to a new version unintentionally. As part of a product’s change management process, there should be an option for users to revert back in the event they’re unprepared for a change and need a familiar interface to complete their work. Users shouldn’t be allowed to defer a change forever, but they should be given avenues to use an older version to avoid severe disruption to their workflows.
Managing change
At Bloomberg, we often talk about UI optimization and product innovation as a “revolution within an evolution.” It’s important that changes to existing products accommodate a user’s preference for what they know and love today, while slowly migrating them to newer versions that enable greater productivity over time.
To drive product innovation that doesn’t disrupt existing workflows, consider these guidelines for your product rollout cycle.