It was strange for me moving from a trading environment to the software as a service industry (SaaS). One of the biggest differences I noticed straight away was how sparse web pages were. Even the early web tools like online banking and broking portals were so inefficiently designed. They failed to optimise screen real estate and forced users to scroll, mouse, search, yada yada yada.
Traders Reuters/Bloomberg terminals and their spreadsheets were nearly always set to the smallest font size you could find (or read). You would use efficient fonts like Arial Narrow to try and squeeze a few more prices into the screens that surrounded you. You didn’t have the luxury of whitespace (actually it was blackspace). The vast majority of traders went for black background designs. This was interesting in itself.
In a way I miss that, it was extremely time and information efficient. It was also easier on the eyes and clearer for the mind. You had all your information laid out in front of you. It can be likened to ‘chess boarding’ your desk with all your paperwork so that you would know exactly where everything is and be able to grab it instantly.
You could see the markets and the world events unfold in realtime. You could be efficient, no transition costs, such as the need to navigate a clumsy mouse, tab through browsers, scroll down screens, drag and drop or refresh web content. Screen real estate was prime real estate. No cares for font-type, white space pixel counts and the finest navigation effects. Just jam it in was the approach so you don’t have to do a single thing except read it.
It dawned on me when I first came into the web applications space that financial markets traders had actually evolved their own designs. The result was quite different to web applications as we know them. Here’s some of my observations.
Traders designed and built their own screens
Traders designed their screen themselves, or ex-traders working for Bloomberg or Reuters helped them. Extremely user centric design, they got exactly what they wanted. There was no lost-in-translation, lost-in-budget or lost-in-design-ego issues to contend with.
Traders built their screens like engineers and not like designers would
Traders are generally left brain logical types which could be described as ‘engineering like’. So their screens were very matrix like. Information was given the best screen real estate if it was the most financially sensitive. Really important financials received the mega-font treatment.
Traders were bad designers, but did it matter?
Web designers and now usability designers tend to come from right-brain imaginative and creative backgrounds (in my experience). The traders didn’t care much for good looking screens. This wasn’t a male thing. There were plenty of female traders in the organisations I worked for and it made no difference. Design extended to font colour and that was it. A non-black background was an outlier in this crowd. Traders seemed to naturally design for screen real estate optimisation and minimal navigation choices (no navigation), so there was an element of design in usability.
I thought I’d write this post to highlight something which has influenced keeping features a click or two away in our Saasu application. It has been extended further in our next Saasu.com release with the new one-click menu.
Photo credit: Matt Seppings
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