Optimizing on the go trading

Trading in the secondaries market has historically been a maze of a process and hard-to-obtain knowledge. Zanbato market operators are responsible for being knowledgeable about the consistently moving private market and what is transacting on ZX; Zanbato’s private marketplace.

I was part of a project to address pain points in the app and improve how the Zanbato market operators could service their broker accounts while on the go.

UX Design Principle & TOols applied

Usability analysis

Information hierarchy

User and task flows

Designing for an emerging industry

As the private market industry took its initial steps, then quickly broke into a run, the process and expectations for a ZX market operator changed drastically. The app struggled to keep up with the increased demands on the market operator and by 2020 was a point of frustration in their workflow.

ZX went through a number of iterations from 2017 to 2020, getting piecemeal updates periodically. But because the app didn’t evolve holistically, the experience became disjointed and clunky.

The Challenge

Help market operators be effective while on the go

There wasn’t a clear improvement needed at the beginning of the project, we knew that operators didn’t usually rely on the app when on the go, often opening their laptop if needed, or writing things down and going back to the web product at a more convenient time. This means that they can’t do their job in a timely fashion, when timeliness plays a huge role in successful trading.

Our high level goals were to:

1. Make it fast and easy to use on the go

2. Allow operators better control over their workflow, focusing on the portions that happened while away from a computer

3. Create a platform that works seamlessly with the web platform that will allow easy transition

Process

I compiled the previous feedback on the app and began by sitting down with Zanbato market operators who were avid users. Working with a product manager and an iOS developer, we worked to release an improved update.

Insights

In the past, a draft ticket to the platform was the most used flow for market operators on the go, and help revolutionize their mobile work when it was released. But at this stage, operators needed to be able to do more. As the secondaries market grew, market operators were working at a more detailed level now and expected to provide well-informed, deep details quickly to our users.

The main flow that operators followed while on the go looks something like this:

Task to optimize

The two main touchpoints to the app were during the operator’s research phase, and the record creation phase.

For this project, we focused on the way a market operator views a company’s ticket market and history, then how they add a ticket for that company.

Current Flow

Friction Points

• Buys and sells were on separate pages, so they were constantly flipping back and forth to compare the two.

• Active, Inactive, and Draft tickets were formatted differently which made it harder to digest.

• When creating a ticket, there was no place to note who’s account they were working on so they often put that in the notes. However typing a freeform name into the notes didn’t allow for proper organization at a later date.

From Scattered to Intentional

To address these issues, the solution would need to bring:

1. More structure in submitting a ticket. There were often times they would add a draft ticket, then have to get back on the computer later onto add more details or change the ticket types. Sometimes they even forgot what the details on the tickets were.

2. Better visibility into the existing tickets for a company. Existing design showed operators a high level summary of a company’s orderbook. At one time this would be enough, but now they need to be able to scan the orderbook quickly, assess the complete market, including recently inactive or connected tickets.They needed to be able to digest this information with low effort and relay the details to their broker all while on the phone

Updated Flow

The updates addressed the issues in the following ways:

1. Brought highest bid and lowest offer to the forefront, immediately on the company list

2. Combined they buy and sell market onto one page for comparison, including inactive tickets as well

3. Creating a separate space for connections to view

4. Adding a source field when entering tickets so they are able to maintain order

results

Some immediate feedback from our market operators:

“Love the orderbook redesign on iOS”

“Strongly agree, phenomenal”

Next Steps

As we monitor activity on the iOS app, we’ll be carefully following the market operators funnels to see if they are