Building a user-led design strategy for an energy commodities trading company

Posted on January 16, 2023November 11, 2024 by Andrew Robert Burgess

Building a proactive design strategy, demonstrating value through user intelligence

Introduction

This case study includes

My role

Head of UX

Team

2 UI Designers
Business Analyst
Development, Research Analysis, Marketing and Data Teams

Stakeholders

CEO
Head of Technology
Head of Marketing
In-house traders

Users

In-house traders
Traders, Researchers and other experts from major energy companies
Investors

Timeline

April 2022 – January 2023 (10 months)

Overview

The company have an established and successful energy commodities trading arm, and were looking to leverage their expertise in the industry to build out their technology offering based around their in-house trading software, and use it to widen their market share and appeal to major energy companies.

Highlights

“ Developing a product strategy that leverages industry knowledge to demonstrate value to a wider audience”

A photo close-up of a computer screen showing trading information arranged to assist traders predict behaviours — Example of a trading interface

Two side-by-side photos of a phone receiving notifications about trading events, and viewing the trading interface to see behaviours of a trading product — Traders receive notifications about developments in the behaviour of a trading product, and are able to view developments on their phones screen, keeping hem updated while away from their desk

Context and goal

The company had established themselves as a successful trader and broker within the energy commodity derivatives space, including producing their own software for trading in oil derivatives. Their aim was to increase their technology offering, leveraging output from their successful Research, Data and Media teams to increase appeal and buy-in from their customer base, which included major energy companies, as well as traders and brokers within the commodities derivatives markets. My goal was to identify ways in which we could increase that appeal, whilst building out the design team to support both existing projects as well as new initiatives.

The Challenge:

Create a way for the company to leverage their considerable domain expertise and demonstrate value to customers to increase revenue, and scale the technology side of the company from its current start-up state.

Building the foundation

Devising an approach

To approach the challenge outlined above, I recognised that we had an opportunity to develop a design strategy that understood the value of what the different parts of the company offered, and leveraged and understanding of user needs to develop a competitive advantage for the product and the company.
This approach was agreed by the CEO and CTO, with the caveat that it should not remove design support from the existing products and teams, and it became clear that I needed to build out the design team to ensure support was provided while I focussed on the new company and product design strategy.

Creating a design team

As the current products were fairly mature, they mostly required support in the creation of UI elements, and so I felt it best to hire two UI Designers, who could start by supporting the existing teams, and then be brought into the new product work later on.
I hired the two UI designers using Lou Adler’s Performance based hiring process, focussing upon expectations rather than a laundry list of required skills, which would help appeal to a more diverse set on candidates, and help balance out the office.
I oversaw the process myself, liaising with recruiters, conducting interviews and organising interviews between the candidates and other members of the company.
We used phone interviews reviewing CV information to screen possible interests, inviting them in for a face-to-face interview and task for the next stage, and finishing with a meeting with the CTO.
Through this process, we successfully hired our two designers, who I then oversaw working for the product teams, checking in daily on product work, and directing designs to ensure that they followed branding and overall strategy.

Creating a user-based design strategy

Before work could start on defining the new product, I needed to raise awareness and demonstrate the value of what I was doing, and get buy in from senior members of the company.
I started by devising a research repository, which would act as a single source that everyone in the company could access in order to see my progress. I took the company Confluence wiki, which had previously been separated into two sections (as product teams for the trading and brokerage arms had been separated into two), and ensured that there was a part of the wiki that everyone in the company could access.

Research

I then started by conducting research with internal traders and brokers, as well as members of the research and sales team to gain a bigger picture and gain a wider understanding of the market before moving on to external users.
During my research, I would write up transcripts of my interviews, summarising them into key observations, which would then be posted onto the wiki. This way, I could then quickly share those observations as insights with stakeholders in order to generate interest in my work through weekly update emails, and encouraging discussion of those observations during meetings.
My observations covered not just insights for future products, but also providing intelligence that could inform strategic decisions, supporting the work of management, market intelligence, sales, marketing and more.
Once I had conducted research with different types of users, I could the use the insights from different individuals within each user type to create personas to sum up those findings, as well as user journeys to explain the work processes which they followed. These were points of focus to understand the differing needs of each types of user, as well as opportunities for people to think of further questions, and identify areas which could be improved, as part of a continual exercise of understanding and development of ideas.

A single user journey, indicating how the user interacts with the software — Combining the separate user journeys into one (blue notes), and then identifying opportunities (green notes) or further questions (red notes)

Discoveries

Insights gained from research with users included:

Product awareness: a number of traders interviewed expressed lack a knowledge of the platform or the company’s other offerings
Reticence: many traders still used Excel sheets to track price movements, which, although unwieldy, provided them with the ability to customise the data they worked with
Varied sources: as part of their work, users needed to consult a range of different sources or data and news, as well as communication channels. These often got quite complex and hard to keep track of
Customisation: the majority of users interviewed expressed an interest in only one commodity or specific markets, and wanted the ability to tailor their view to show just the areas they were interested in.
Staying informed: traders, brokers and other users expressed a need to be able to keep up with trends and changes, not just in the office, but also while on the move, being told of changes in prices as well as the events in markets and geopolitics that caused those changes.

Solutions

Following the discoveries above, I worked with senior stakeholders to develop a product strategy which would continue to provide value in the short term, whilst also working on the longer term goal of developing their main trading platform.

Showing data value early

We felt that product awareness was one of the above discoveries that we could address with less effort and maximum impact, as well as use to demonstrate value. One way to generate interest quickly was to leverage the proprietary market data which the company produced, which when demonstrated to users could then underpin the value of the trading platform we were producing.

In order to demonstrate this data, we needed a way for users, including those less technically minded, to be able to access it easily. As many users already used large Excel sheets to pull in data for trading analysis, then we could demonstrate it to them, and they could even pull it into their own trading sheets later on using a subscription-based API.

We worked with our development teams to create an Excel plugin where users could select data streams in markets relevant to their interests, as well as formatted in the way they preferred. This approach also began to address the user requirement for customisation, allowing the user to select the data they were interested in, and only have to pay for that, in contrast to previous approaches where users were provided with information in all markets for a flat subscription fee, which they would then filter down in the app.

This was provided as a free trial for a couple of weeks, with further access available for a price. We also designed and created a promotional page where users could be directed to for information via promotional videos and testimonies, and online signup reducing the need for any manual onboarding.

Part of a web page promoting the API service with the still of a video showing an Excel screen — Part of the promotional page we built for the API, giving quotes from previous users and a run through of how easy it was to import and work with the data in Excel. We offered a trial period, and then users to customise and pay for the data streams that they were interested in.

Thanks to the efforts of our Sales team, the Excel plugin and API helped demonstrate to a wide user base the value of our data, and generated interest in our work on improving our trading platform.

Combining and customising information

Following our success with the Excel plugin and API, we then wanted to adapt the awareness and customisation concepts to our plans for the trading platform. We identified that these could be combined with two other discoveries, namely varied sources and staying informed, where we could bring in other services the company provided to demonstrate value.

Through conversations with users, we identified that while the data was useful, understanding the geopolitical, social and other reasons behind short and long-term trends is vital to being able to predict market behaviour. Therefore, we could use the high-quality market research produced by our in-house team to augment the value of the data, which would align behaviours with world events, to provide a holistic view of the customised information that the user subscribed to.

This also meant we could offer an adaptive pricing model, providing further value to the user by ensuring that they only paid for the information and data that they were interested in, in place of the previous model where users paid a flat fee for the entire service.

Diagram showing a concept around combining previously separate services into a combined information service that users can customise to the markets they are interested in — The principle behind combining the data from different sources, and then providing it as different streams that were tailored to the user’s needs and interests, from different markets to different ways of consuming and using the information.

A “dawn to dusk” service

As well as choosing the energy products that were relevant to them and the information streams they wanted to receive, we studied their working patterns to understand just how they wanted to consume the information, and how we could best provide it to them.
It was this way that we devised the “dawn to dusk” service, which provided a series of channels and ways of obtaining information throughout the day that Traders could choose to fit their own requirements. These included:
- A responsive view to the trading desktop, allowing users to access information on smaller devises, with information prioritised for “quick check” (mobile) or “lean back” (tablet) approaches (even adapting to smaller desktop windows), taking their preferred channels and information streams with them on the go.
- Notifications via inbuilt application, or on WhatsApp channels, alerting them to changes, or providing communication with other Traders or Brokers.

Predictive models

Using the data from our controlling share of the market, our teams also devised a way to turn them into predictive modelling, using machine logic to predict likely movements within a market.
This prediction model showed the probability of various paths, which informed users of the safety of their trading bids.

Aftermath

Following some reviews of the company, the decision was made to downgrade the software production team, and my ideas were shelved in preference for a more pared-down approach. Despite this, I am very proud of the progress I made, and grateful for the opportunity to demonstrate my ability to adapt to an industry I previously had little understanding of, as well as identify value quickly to stakeholders to help champion our efforts.

Retrospective

Project takeaways:

I managed to establish a proactive design team, who worked alongside product development teams to ensure that strategic decisions were based upon evidence from user and business intelligence
This also challenged the culture of C-level executives changing direction every few weeks, leading to more direction and reduced stress for product teams
While the company decided not to continue with my plans for the product, they said that they felt I had done some excellent work, and I had provided them with a good template for future product developments, some of which have actually been adopted since I left the company.
I also feel that if this work had been continued, it would have provided a highly competitive advantage in an industry which had been lacking in innovation.

Building a remote design team, and advocating for better UX practices

Posted on September 15, 2021November 23, 2024 by Andrew Robert Burgess

Creating a design team in India, improving skills and permeating UX throughout a company

Introduction

This case study includes

My role

UX Lead

Team

Leadership
Multifunctional product teams
My own design team

Stakeholders

Heads of Design
C-suite executives

Timeline

Various roles since 2016

Overview

Since reaching the role of UX Lead in 2016, I have both worked on creating and maturing design teams when I have been given the opportunity to do so. In other situations, I have advocated for user-centred design principles and better ways of working, both within multifunctional product teams and across wider companies. Here I share the work I’ve done, and the methods I’ve used to achieve success in my endeavours.

Building and growing a design discipline in India

I spent several years working in an international product team within a scientific publishing company, with Business and Product Management roles in Germany, and the Product Development team in India. I was then offered the chance to start a UX design team in the Pune office, as it became clear that it would be more efficient for designers to be situated in the same office as the product teams they worked with.

The brief

To create a team of six designers who would be assigned to different product teams, understanding the specific requirements of those teams, and ensuring the designers allocated were suited to those requirements
Providing support to my team members, helping them with their everyday work and interactions with their team and the company, and helping them to learn and mature as designers
To work with my designers, their teams and others within the Pune office to raise awareness of user-centred design and improve working practices.
To represent my team and advocate for their needs within the wider international design discipline, covering 36 designers in 4 countries.

Part one: recruitment

The first stage was finding the designers to be in my team
As I was based in London, I had to initially plan and hold the recruitment remotely, then flying across to Pune to hold in-person interviews.
The process had various stages, mirroring the same processes that our design discipline used to recruit designers in other countries, and so not only did I have to plan interviews for myself and the candidates, but also with team members they would be working with (to ensure that they would be able to work together), as well as final interviews with the Global Head of Design.
We found the market to be very competitive, with a limited number of candidates who had a good understanding of UX being able to pick and choose roles offered to them. As I also had limited time in which I could interview them in person, I devised a process that would after an initial screener call to assess ability, would get them into the office for a day where we could conduct interviews and practical tasks, before making them an offer by the end of the day. This method helped us to make attractive offers to candidates before another company got to them first.

A diagram showing the devised process for recruiting User Experience Designers in Pune — Sketch showing the recruitment process we used in Pune, from CV reviews and online screener calls to holding interviews and practicals in one day, so that we could quickly assess and hire candidates.

As tech roles have a strong male dominance, we wanted to ensure when advertising the role that we could appeal to as diverse a pool of candidates as possible.
We therefore used Lou Adler’s Performance Based Hiring, a principle that advertised the role based upon what they would be doing, rather than a laundry list of skills and past achievements. This was due to the fact that candidates who weren’t male often looked at lists like these and assumed that they would not be suitable for it if they could not prove every requirements, while male candidates felt they could apply for a role if they suited some or most of the requirements.

A written job listing, showing what will be expected of an employee in the first 3 months, 6 months and beyond. — An example of a job listing based upon Performance Based Hiring. Instead of listing required skills and abilities, the job posting defines that the prospective employee will be doing, which allows people to adapt their own experiences, rather than being daunted by not having specific experiences.

The HR team in our Pune office were very helpful in arranging the advertising and screening candidates, but did have some trouble adopting this new approach. I worked closely with them to help them understand these new practices, and work out the best way to review applicants.
Thankfully, the approach worked, and we ended up hiring a very balanced and capable team.

Part two: support

Working back in London, I would have weekly 1-2-1 sessions with each of my team members, as a chance to review the work they were doing, and discuss any questions that they were encountering. This also supplemented the fact that they could reach me at any time via Teams or email, so that questions could be answered as quickly as possible.
I also had weekly meetings with Product Owners and Team heads to gain feedback on my team, discuss any problems, and plan initiatives to improve ways of working.
I visited the Pune office 4-5 times a year, where I would be able to support my team in person, as well as see them working in their own teams. We would also held retrospective sessions to collect feedback from the team about their working experiences, discuss approaches and devise solutions.
These were all then reported back to the Global Head of UX, along with my fellow UX Leads, so that we could devise a combined approach to our various teams.

Sticky notes on a board, outlining the outcomes of a session discussing the problems we face — A view of an “anchors and engines” session (deliberately obscured, for privacy reasons), where participants can raise issues that are driving them on, or holding them back. Below are sails (extra things we might do to improve our process) and sharks (things we should look out for). These can then be grouped and discussed to devise a plan of action.

Part three: development

As the UX leadership, we defined that the two areas of focus should be:
- Improving the design skills and maturity of our teams of designers
- Improving design knowledge and practices across product teams and the wider company
Using models generated from Jared Spool’s work, we created two tools to help us with these efforts:

1. Improving design skills

In order to measure and improve skills across our teams in four different countries, we needed to establish a baseline on which they were all measured.
As UX covers a wealth of different skills and disciplines, some prominent while others are less visible, we wanted to ensure that we could assess each member of our teams on those skills.
We devised a Skills Map, detailing every skill and discipline that UX design covers, breaking them down into smaller aspects, and mapped the skills out into five areas; Research, Analysis and Strategy, Design, Delivery and Core Skills. This gave us levels of granularity to properly identify excellence and knowledge gaps.
We then created a scale on which to measure ability in each skill, from zero (meaning that they knew absolutely nothing about this subject) through to three (meaning that they were enough of an authority on the subject that they would be willing to stand up tomorrow and give a talk about it).

Feels in a table in excel, showing the overall skill of Analytics, and facets of that skill, such as Basic Concepts, Setting up and Statistics. — Example of a Skill and different facets within to be assessed on. We would discuss each facet with our reports, and assess how much they felt they knew about each section, marking each section from 0 (don’t know anything about it at all) to 3 (could give a talk about it tomorrow).

Using these scales, we were then able to sit with each of our reports and go through the Skills Map, asking them to honestly declare how comfortable they felt with each subject. Rather than just taking their word for it, we would challenge them if we felt they had under or over estimated on a certain scale.
By doing this, we were able to draw together the final scores to understand where our reports knew a lot about a given area where we could use their knowledge to help educate others, or opportunities for improvement where we could help them understand more.

Screenshot showing the spreadsheet and analytics we used to measure skills levels across the UX team — Using these skills maps, we could then put together a picture of people’s abilities in different sections, and identify areas for study and tuition.

2. Improving design knowledge

As well as assessing our designers, we wanted to run a similar process with our product teams, in order to identify opportunities for improving design knowledge and maturity, and recommend better ways of working.
Using a UX playbook devised by Jared Spool, which defined areas of design maturity within teams and organisations, and worked on a similar 4-point scale to our Skills Maps above, we were able to conduct similar reviews with our design reports and other members of their product teams, to give their own opinions around how involved and infused UX Design was within their own working practices.
As above, this helped us to define a UX strategy roadmap of work to help improve that design maturity within production teams and the wider company, which we could then work with our designer reports to enact.
With this approach, we were able to get Product Owners and Business Analysts, Developers and Project Managers focussing their work around user needs. This led to better understand of not just what they were building, but the reason why they were building it, and gave them more agency and satisfaction in their work, which led them taking active interest in how the product performed after launch.

Championing better design practices

As part of the work I did in India, as well as in other roles, I’ve created and delivered programmes of work to help teams and companies realise the benefits of user-focussed production and improve their ways of working.

Introductory presentations

Often within companies who don’t have much design maturity, people who aren’t designers either won’t have heard of user-centred design, or will assume it’s solely the remit of the design department. In these cases, it’s often useful to start with a presentation which helps set out your position, as well as set a level between those people who have never heard of these concepts with those who might know a little.

Screenshot of a presentation slide, with "UX is not", and a list of different misconceptions around UX — A typical slide from a “What is UX” presentation, breaking some misconceptions around what some perceive UX to be.

These talks are not just standalone events, but openings to conversations and discoveries around current practices; are they confused between the terms UX and UI, do they involve users, or is the product direction solely defined by product owners, expecting the designers to just push pixels? By understanding the current situation, as with the example in India above, it helps us to create a program of work to address these understandings and improve the ways in which teams work and products are delivered. What’s more, as these things are hard to deliver alone, it helps you to identify people who might well be useful allies and advocates, to help support and spread your message.

Information sheets

Whilst a presentation might be useful in informing people of your plans, it is also useful to communicate smaller concepts with colleagues and stakeholders during projects. One such method we devised was designing “One Page UX Processes”, a series of one page PDFs which we could use as a tool to help explain a concept to someone, and then leave behind with them to later review, or share with others. We designed the sheets to give a high-level overview, explaining what each concept is, how it works, and the benefits of using it.

Single sheet explaining the processes behind Lean UX Design — An example “One Page Process Sheet”, explaining principles behind Iterative Processing and Lean UX Design

Remote ideation workshop

People often learn better by doing, and, when asked to provide a short workshop during a remote office activity afternoon, I saw the opportunity to provide something that would both educate and entertain. I therefore devised a small ideation workshop, which would help my colleagues to learn about the UX process, as well as having a chance to be creative, think in ways they were not used to thinking, and even introduce a note of competition around the solutions they created.

I worked out a simple open ended problem, asking them to devise a route-finding application, and then created three personas – an old man, a blind woman, and a cycle courier. I introduced the team to the problem and these three personas, and asked them to draw a solution which took the requirements of the three personas into consideration. Of course, I assured those who said that they couldn’t draw that this was conceptual, and they could communicate their ideas using boxes, arrows and wording. I gave them about 20 minutes to draw, and then asked each person to share and explain their ideas with the group, encouraging the rest of the group to ask questions and provide feedback after they had finished. The group said that they found the session highly enjoyable, and felt that they appreciated how UX design was focussed upon user needs, rather than something dreamed up by the production team.

Step by step guide, showing people how to draw and share their ideas in the ideation session — The guide I provided to the remote ideation session, showing how people could draw and share their ideas with the group

Blog posts

UX is a continual learning process, and during my work, I also make interesting discoveries. I was invited to share some thoughts on the company blog, and so again used this as a teaching opportunity. I wanted to share details about the importance of an iterative approach to software production, but felt that just talking about that could be seen as a bit dry. I remembered the story that I had read when I was young of Percy Shaw, who discovered Cats Eyes, the road safety feature that lit up the centre white line of the road by reflecting car headlights back at them. I remembered in the story about how Shaw had iterated numerous times on his design, and had even literally “road tested” his creations on a stretch of country road late at night himself, eventually gaining a contract with the Government to produce them for UK roads, after streetlights were put out to evade bombing runs in World War II. This blog post gained praise from colleagues and clients, and became a useful link to share with people who tried to cut corners when it came to testing the products they were building.

Thumbnail of blog post page — The blog post I wrote on Cats Eyes, and showing the value of iterative design and testing

You can read my post here on the Scott Logic blog.

The most important part: conversation

All of the above initiatives can be useful ways of communicating ideas, but their efficacy is severely diminished without one important element – conversation. This could be discussions of UX processes during a project, a chat with a colleague during a coffee break, or any number of touchpoint interactions where you get the chance to discuss how you can help with a problem. The conversations help glue together other initiatives such as the ones above, and help remind people of their existence, so that when a situation arises which could benefit from these approaches, they turn to UX for help.

As previously mentioned, you can also use these opportunities to work out the people who are more receptive and excited by how these ideas can help. These people can often turn into advocates, who can help you spread the message, and, if they are senior, might even help effect change within company-wide practices.

Conclusion

I’ve successfully created a user-focussed production culture within several companies, both in manager and non-manager roles, helping them to work together better and deliver more successful products, which have in turn led to increased profits and happier teams.
People in teams I have managed have gone on to excel in their careers, with the help of my mentoring. Some have risen to more senior roles afterwards, including Heads and Directors of Design.
If you’re interested in what I could do for your company, why not get in touch?