Morgan Stanley · 2016

Order entry for a trading floor

$6B traded through it every day
64% of internal users adopted it in under a month
Multi-year design system contract that followed
Role
Lead UX Designer, Idean
Client
Morgan Stanley
Year
2016

From a quiet studio to a multi-year engagement: I found the RFP, won the pitch, and led the redesign of Morgan Stanley’s mutual funds order entry, where about $6 billion changes hands every day.

01

On the floor

Weeks of contextual inquiry at One New York Plaza. Every desk was covered in Post-its and workarounds.

Broker desk hacks
Broker desk hacks
Legacy tooling
Legacy tooling
Paper options ticket
Paper options ticket
Green screen terminal
Green screen terminal
02

Four principles

Filtered by cost versus impact, every finding mapped to one of four principles.

Context
Context
Defragment
Defragment
Efficiency
Efficiency
Experience
Experience
03

The 20% that matters

Whiteboarding with the client to find the tasks 80% of traders use, and the cross-silo routines nobody had mapped.

Workshop
Workshop
Flowchart
Flowchart
From the whiteboard to a layout: household ledger, stacked order tickets and a mini order blotter
From the whiteboard to a layout: household ledger, stacked order tickets and a mini order blotter
04

Tickets that grow with the order

Stacked, responsive order tickets that expand only as the order requires. Fully keyboard-driven, with no mental checklists.

Order ticket interaction
Ticket states
Ticket states
05

A design system contract

The success turned into a multi-year engagement to bring every asset class into one design language.

Design system
Design system

Team

  • Dave George, PM
  • Paul Zumbrink, UX Lead
  • Vanessa Fahy, Visual Design
  • Alice Grantham, Design Research