Taking the Friction Out of Trading

Overview

J.P. Morgan felt that their website for derivative warrant (DW) traders was cluttered and hard to navigate. As a result, users struggled to complete tasks on the site or weren't aware of the company’s complete offerings. This may have also caused some users to leave for competitors' products.

Our solution

We determined the needs of both new and experienced DW traders through research and by running usability tests on prototypes. After studying the feedback, we iterated new designs and streamlined the workflows used to perform tasks. In the end, our team created a first-class website for traders of all skill levels thanks to the valuable input of our research participants.

Our process

Determining user needs → Usability testing → Feedback gathering → Design iteration

During the research phase of this project, our goal was to find out what DW traders want out of the J.P. Morgan DW trading platform, how they navigate it, their experience of it, and their proficiency level.

As DW trading is a specialized field, Seven Peaks’s research team decided to include traders of varying proficiency levels in our research. We chose five participants to give us an idea of how a variety of users interact with the website.

Our process was this: we determined user needs through research, conducted usability tests via prototyping with DW traders, acquired and studied feedback, and iterated new designs from this data.

Research, methodology, and objectives

To get a clearer picture of the site's users, we grouped users based on their DW trading proficiency. The three skill groups were novice, average, and sophisticated users. We observed each group’s pain points, struggles, and how they handled user flows, which helped us fine-tune the user interface. We then created a prototype for the DW site, and our developers used logging software to observe the five participants.

The data we collected formed the basis of how we defined usability and determined which site elements needed to be changed or fixed. It also showed us what the average DW trader wants to see on J.P. Morgan’s trading platform.

Challenges we overcame

1. Defining usability

In order to set a usability standard, we needed to define usability in this context. Given the site and its users, here’s how we defined it:

• Learnability: how easily can a first-time user accomplish a task when seeing it for the first time? 

• Efficiency: how quickly can a user finish a task? 

• Errors: how often does a user make a mistake? How serious is the mistake? How quickly do they recover from it? 

• Satisfaction: how pleasant is the design to use? 

We established these metrics in the early stages of the research, allowing us to create a user interface that met J.P. Morgan’s standards for its customers.

2. User experience

One challenge that J.P. Morgan faced was that their old website was hard to understand and navigate, which made it hard for people to understand the content or what J.P. Morgan was offering.

Our research gave us the data we needed to create a workable solution for the user interface and streamline the workflows that our participants used to perform tasks. 

Including research participants of varying skills provided us with enough feedback to create a DW trading site that would work for not only experts but also people just getting into it.

3. Miscellaneous challenges

Our participants brought some challenges to our attention that didn’t fit into a specific category. We looked into them and discovered that they were all minor issues. Our developers addressed them based on how they affect the user experience. After asking our research participants for more information, we implemented simple fixes, such as tidying up the user interface further. 

While minor issues don’t have a big impact on the user experience, solving them goes a long way toward preventing future issues.