BLOOMBERG

Bloomberg Terminal... on a small screen? 

The quintessential challenge in translating complex desktop functionality to mobile devices – that best describes my work as Experienced Interaction Designer for the Bloomberg Professional Mobile team.

Bloomberg Professional, also known as the Terminal due to its hardware-based origins, is a real-time news and market data service and electronic trading platform for financial professionals worldwide. The Terminal is an extremely powerful environment, in which a command line drives a multi-panel (and usually multi-screen) GUI. Amongst the thousands of available commands, or functions, depending on their job roles Bloomberg users employ a small and highly customized set to support their daily workflows. For those trading around the clock and around the world, Bloomberg Professional on mobile is an essential and integral component of their toolset.

Bloomberg Asset and Investment Manager (AIM) for Mobile

My role in this project was to kick off requirements definition, beginning with a round of stakeholder interviews (product managers, subject matter experts, and end users). The findings from this research, combined with deep dives into the actual desktop product facilitated by my desktop design colleagues, enabled me to map the daily activities and communication interactions of research analysts, portfolio managers, and traders. 

Once flows were established, the next step was to identify data elements critical to supporting the user's workflow, and then start the process of sketching, prioritizing screen elements, and exploring various UI patterns.

My wireframes informed a set of visuals presented by mobile product management at the AIM 2014 Summit (internal product planning session).

Instant Bloomberg Redesign

There are chat apps... and then there is Instant Bloomberg (IB). Part bulletin board, part instant messenger, IB has several unique characteristics:

• persistence – some IB chats are transient for a day; others are permanent chat rooms, with owners and customizable settings
• taxonomy – IB chats can be organized into folders, folders into managers
• scale of use – many IB users have more than 50 chats they must monitor daily
• customization – notifications on mobile are especially important to IB users
• overnight reset – chats are reset at midnight EST daily, but history is available, even for transient chats

The Mobile engineering team was embarking on a code rewrite for mobile IB, which became a good opportunity to rethink the design and add new functionality. I travelled to London for a week of Lean UX-style design sessions, sitting with the IB engineering leads to brainstorm, sketch, and hash out a design approach.

We identified and prioritized a few key user stories, and arrived at our design in about six weeks' turnaround.