-
Barclays Global Investors: Apex
Portfolio management and trading platformWhen this project began, Barclays Global Investors ("BGI," now part of BlackRock), was the world's largest money manager. Its portfolio managers used quantitative techniques to drive investment decisions, trading billions of dollars a day with tools that included homegrown command-line, spreadsheets, Windows tools, and third-party systems. In order to increase market responsiveness, improve workflows, and better manage risk, BGI set about creating Apex, a unified portfolio management and trading platform. They knew that a world-class user experience was essential to the success of the platform, and brought Cooper in for a multi-year engagement to design every interface and interaction.
The Cooper design team worked closely with BGI users, product managers, and technologists to consolidate a product vision, define user experience requirements, create a high-level conceptual framework, and design every angle of the highly sophisticated user interface.
-
A deep & flexible platform
Apex's user base includes analysts, portfolio managers, traders and managers from all over the world, who are focused on a wide variety of asset classes. With such variety of skills and experience, it was impractical to design specific solutions for each user. Instead, the design team focused on key archetypes and created easily adaptable interface patterns that allowed end users to continually customize their tools as their needs evolved.
-
Bringing the big picture to life with data visualization
Quantitative investment approaches require vast amounts of market data, and it's simply not possible for portfolio managers and traders to proactively stay on top of everything. Apex helps these users focus their attention with views and tools that highlight the right information. Users can explore detail with an in-place inspector, drill deeper, or quickly make adjustments to trading strategies.
-
Results
The Cooper team collaborated with key users on a weekly basis, and developers on a daily basis. As a result, designs quickly converged to a solution that met user needs while working within the technical framework. Apex is now in use, with millions of dollars worth of transactions flowing through it daily.
