1. The Brief
2. Explore the Problem. Fast
3. Prototype solutions
4. Reduce Risk and Increase Likelihood of Success
5. Final Thoughts

The Brief

My job as lead UX designer on the project was to very quickly:

• Engage with stakeholders in Chicago to get their input, and to reassure them with tangible progress.
• Work with everyone in the team to map the tasks, create shared understanding and identify potential problems.
• Identify key user tasks we needed to support and devise a set of designs that prioritised these. This became the basis for our iterative release plan.
• Work with the team to conceive a feasible design and strategy that would enable us to build and release a valuable first version and iterate on this frequently.

Explore the Problem. Fast

This project was unlike any I'd done before. What we had to build was more or less known from the native apps. The challenge we had, was how to deliver a viable mobile web alternative to these apps as quickly as possible.

If we'd simply tried to rebuild the native app experience in the browser, it would have taken too long. What we had to do was prioritise our users' tasks and explore new ways to support these in a way that could be delivered quickly, while creating a flexible foundation for the features that would be built later.

To achieve this, I planned and facilitated a 7 day Design Sprint. It's collaborative nature would give our newly formed team the chance to build a rapport quickly, as well as reach a shared understanding of the problems and possible solutions as we went. On top, the creation of tangible deliverables enabled us to evaluate our work quickly, and reassure anxious stakeholders.

Within 5 days we had an iterative delivery plan that prioritised functionality most needed by traders and a number of designs for these key tasks with contributions from everyone in the team.

Prototype Solutions

With a plan and a shared understanding of the key tasks, the engineers were able to begin building out the front-end and integrating it with the exisintg back end. Though we didn't know what the final designs would be at this point, we knew what functionality needed to be there.

The UI designer and I got cracking on the key design problems... working out how to strip back the native app's familiar UI to the absolute essential, and how to iteratively build this back up as we released new functionality. All while ensuring a cohesive experience that continued to instill trust.

Within a week, we had mapped out each release and how the designs would evolve with each, prioritising the most essential user tasks. The first being, a new UI that allowed traders to view and close existing positions, without the usual ability to increase exposure or open new positions.

The rapid, visual progress we were making was a huge reassurance for our stakeholders too.

Reduce Risk and Increase Likelihood of Success

Though we were working on an intense schedule, releasing without usability testing is just asking for trouble. Particularly in finance where real losses could be incurred due to ambiguous or unclear UI and interactions.

As I worked, I created interactive prototypes of each iteration we planned to make. This was an invaluable resource for our UI designer and engineers, but also exactly what was needed for user feedback. Within 12 days of starting this project, we had real customers testing our designs.

One example of a unique problem to overcome, that we didn't have with native apps, was helping users discover and "install" the web app. This is particularly important for a trading app such as Nadex's where data density is high. There were few best-practices available, and though Android's Chrome made some attempt to inform users, Apple made none.

The decision to prioritise testing meant that by week 5, we'd iterated a number of times on these challenges, not only in the UI, but also collaborating with marketing to properly inform customers. These efforts paid off hugely as we saw 80% of mobile traders successfully "install" the web app to their homescreens. This meant they had the best trading experience possible and Nadex had a sizable share of traders ready to use the PWA should they lose access to the native apps.

Final Thoughts

The 4 months I spent on this project were some of the most fulfilling I've had in my career. From start to finish it showcased how effective an empowered team can be, if trusted to make decisions. Which I think we earned with a very transparent way of working and rapid, visible progress.

It definitely helped that the product team was perhaps the strongest I'd ever worked with. It wasn't just their skill and expertise that enabled us to move so quickly, but their willingness to engage meaningfully in cross-functional collaboration. It was intese, but it was also a lot of fun.

In a relatively short space of time we had exceeded business expectations and offered customers an entirely new channel to trade from, with a measurably improved experience.