Building a personalized, robust companion app to better empower traders

2020
VSA Partners
My role
  • Redesigned the app structure, navigation, and content “centers of gravity”
  • Created hypotheses around key functionality and facilitated remote storymapping worksessions
  • Ideated, wireframed, and prototyped templates, components, and micro-animations
  • Created 100+ pages of detailed specs for interactions, content states, and personalization logic, for an offshore development team
Project results
  • Increase in number of visits and time spent in app, with more robust and personalized features
  • Increase in app user ratings, up to 4.7 in the App Store
  • Much clearer alignment and consistency among CME Group site, mobile app, and pro apps
Situation
CME Group Mobile was an outdated pricing app, cobbled together from market data and pieces of thought capital. It needed a purposeful structure before inheriting the new “Transform” design system.
Solution
  • The app unified timely market data, push notifications, tools, educational content, and product discovery to empower newer retail traders.
  • Watchlists and product merchandising let traders better hone in on their positions, which also benefitted ecoystem lock-in.
  • Moments of progressive personalization, preference capture, and app customization present a trader with more relevant product and insight discovery.
Engagement
Brand strategy: Kyle Flynn, Josh Looby | Creative direction: Nick Lo Bue | UX: Andrew Day | Content strategy: Andrew Day, Andrew Lewellen | Design: Jehan Cowan, Heather Stickney | Account management: Jerry Stiedeman, Melissa Keller | Development: CME Group
Prioritization
I created epics and user stories for priority content and functionality for the app. I facilitated a remote story mapping worksession with stakeholders in the US and UK to validate priorities.
UX architecture
I created an app architecture and navigation schema to elevate priority features, such as alerts, watchlists, and search. Across the architecture we identified valuable moments of engagement to make the experience more personalized and meaningful.
Experience basics
I defined a set of experience principles to hold up against our work, which began with low-fidelity schematics that showed the flows of screens handling key new functionality.
UX design
For a few prominent moments like Home and Search, I sketched multiple concepts, and then wireframed key interactions and states so stakeholders and designers knew what to expect.
Design support
I prototyped and animated the visual design of some key page builds, onboarding, contextual menus, and gesture actions, to demonstrate transition styles and timing to the development team.
Delivery
I created 100+ pages of ux and content documentation for development. This included standard interaction specs, plus content states and personalization display logic.
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