Thomson Reuters
As part of a core team of designers, strategists, and developers, we were tasked with designing a financial tool to put Thomson Reuters’ existing platform, Eikon, out of business.
Meet Angela
Thomson Reuters worked with Cooper in New York on the initial research phase for Project Omaha. Out of the set of personas, Angela Lin was selected as the primary target for our design efforts.
Our team picked up where Cooper left off, taking their data and initial direction, to create what would ultimately lead to the redesign of Thomson Reuters existing platform, Eikon.
There’s never enough time in the day for Angela to consume as much information as she’d like. Angela could easily fill her day with news, reports, and background materials just on companies in her portfolio and her watch list, let alone the rest of her universe. She feels she wastes a significant amount of time separating relevant information from noise, but is afraid to rely on filters and alerts in case she misses something important.
Frustrations
There isn’t enough time in the day.
She’s always working even when she’s not working. She doesn’t just need information for her job, she’s an information junkie.
Software changes all the time. She’s tired of interfaces that aren't intuitive.
She’s always chasing alpha. The tiniest advantage translates into assets.
Goals
Crush her benchmark regardless of a good or bad day.
Stay connected to her network so she can be one step ahead of the market.
Be right and grow the fund. All the research in the world amounts to nothing if she doesn’t make the right call. Being right is its own reward, but it’s not the only one. When Angela is right, the fund attracts more investors, too.
Creative Leadership
Our team took Omaha from an idea, to a complex yet intuitive tool for the financial industry.
I personally led the visual design of Omaha's data-dense components, providing additional support for the over all product. My goal was to create a clean, yet unexpectedly-rich experience, with depth and sophistication that integrates with Angela's universe and elevates her daily consumption of information.
Visual Design is Critical in Complex Environments
Visual design played a critical role in how data was consumed, as well as building user confidence in the brand.
Controls and navigation were softly deemphasized with darker color choices. Lighter components brought focus to primary tasks and data. Therefore Omaha was a hybrid between more traditional dark-themed financial tools, and more modern light-themed applications. Subtle gradients and textures accomplished an added polish consistent with brand objectives without overcomplicating the interface.
How Visual Design
Decisions Matters
Real-time monitoring offered a unique visual-design challenge. To help Angela digest the most relevant information in such a data-dense landscape, I worked with a darker color palette throughout to ensure time-sensitive indicators and alerts were the primary focus and easily visible, even from a distance.
Building a large, complex product requires meticulous attention to detail. At the end of the design process, I provided our development teams with detailed specs, addressing limitations as needed to ensure the end product reflected the vision. Finally, utilizing all of the work that had been done — by myself, the other designers, and Cooper — I crafted the final Omaha design system and reviewed ongoing work to ensure consistency with standards.
In an industry where seconds matter, providing comprehensive, relevant data instantly is key.
After months of demos and user testing, it was clear that Omaha was excelling where Eikon had previously fallen short. An improved visual-design experience played an enormous role in how quickly and effectively data was consumed.
Due to our success, our team was given the responsibility of redesigning Eikon where we applied everything we learned. Ultimately the relaunch of Eikon led to an increase in user adoption by nearly 22% in 2013, and $1.5b in sales. But above all, we gave users like Angela a tool that delivered an immense amount of data in a single elegant interface, saving her time and improving her ability to make the right call for her clients in a New York minute.