Everything uses design, whether it's conscious or not, the application you have today that looks (and performs) like an Excel spreadsheet looks and performs that way because that's the way it was designed. If it's difficult to use, if there are too many pop-ups, if parts of the same system look divergent from other parts it's because - that's the way they were designed. We often hear frustration from application owners; they've put a great deal of resource into developing the best system out there, but then the interface doesn't live up to the promise of the controls.

This is often when the call for help comes in; can you PLEASE help us 'put lipstick on this pig'. The way we look at it, you've already been successful, you've been able to design the application to perform and interface a certain way. Now we just need to redefine our goals and work towards a design that will better suit your users. However, two underlying questions remain; 'did the call come too late in the build process' and 'is design really ONLY about skinning a framework with visual candy?'.

Financial design (and any good design) is more than graphic design. Often the biggest wins occur in interfaces when we take into consideration how humans and computers interact. How data is sifted, sorted, categorized and delivered, how easy it can be 'digested' by users. If it's time to make a quick trade and you're holding three miles of ticker tape you may have a problem. However if you're in front of a dashboard full of charts and graphs you're going to have access to a better interface for that same data. If we take that one step further and begin to define user rolls and then deliver content and context specifically to those rolls and your system become even more relevant. An individual and a bulk trader need and care about vastly different views of data, and will carry out their trades in dissimilar ways.

FUTURE TRADING

The day is quickly coming when we will interface with data in a much different way. Imagine for a moment you're taking a walk down Wall Street one afternoon. You're probably aware of some of the buildings, what companies are inside, where your friends work, your favorite lunch spot, and of course you mind is conscious of all the street activity; sign iconography, people , movement, weather, noises and general activity. Now if you happened to be walking your laptop on a leash at the same time, and your laptop had eyes, ears, and some legs to keep up with you, and this same strange laptop had access to JUST the information that's on the web today.. It would be viewing the world around it in a completely (jaw dropping) different way.

It might know the dates the different buildings were constructed, the history of the architects, the stone and materials, the historical records of all the relevant companies that were housed in the buildings, it could connect to social networks and know a great deal about the employees inside, maybe it could even gauge faces, compare the attitude against the market and current world events and so on.. The information is out there already, the two elements that make it useful are coming up with software to mine all that data, and then developing a sophisticated interface to deliver it to humans in a relevant way.

There are some steps we can make immediately including learning better who are users are and coming up with new methods that allow users to ACT on that data. Maybe when it's time to allocate funds we drag pieces of a pie chart around to control risk, instead of inputting percentages. Or maybe we apply filters (lenses) to all of the market research data in front of us, would the same data appear differently if it was filtered and evaluated by a high-risk lens? What if we could follow market news that is defined by what the top earning 5% are exposed to? Maybe that news gets prioritized by how long the collective users kept the page open, or how much they scrolled.

CAN I TRUST YOU

The other major component to financial design is the trust issue. Traders will evaluate your product based on they way they can interface with it, if it's mostly a white screen, they (on some level) will think 'it's broken', if the numbers are hard to read because there's not enough contrast it's going to be hard to use. How many clicks does it take to perform a function, are the functions lined up in logical way so one task leads to the next? If they have to use several parts of a larger application do they look and perform the same or will the user have to relearn user interface elements? (cancel vs close, delete vs cancel, clear vs delete)

How well your product works will have a direct effect on how your brand is perceived - there was a study done where users were asked to perform an internet search using different web browser (Google, Ask.com, Yahoo) - although the results were exactly the same the results revealed that the users thought the 'trusted brand' (better known) returned more accurate result sets, quicker. In another study, users were asked to make transactions on two ATM machines, the exact same data, only one of the interfaces was a bit more aesthetically challenged. Again overwhelmingly users of the more attractive system finished their transactions in less time and with less problems. One reason for this may be due to our "evolutionary biology and what we know about how our brains work. Basically, when we are relaxed, our brains are more flexible and more likely to find workarounds to difficult problems. In contrast, when we are frustrated and tense, our brains get a sort of tunnel vision where we only see the problem in front of us. How many times, in a fit of frustration, have you tried the same thing over and over again, hoping it would somehow work the seventeenth time around?" (Norman)

CONCLUSION

The more our information and interface systems advance, the more we will be able to see how humans best interact with data, and how function and form are inextricably intertwined. The old belief that these are two separate beasts in two separate cages completely ignores the growing evidence of the way our minds work.