Murex UX and Business Analyst Teams Innovated New Dealing Desk by Homing in on the User Journey

Paris, France - November 26, 2020

by Mohamed Turki, head of asset management practice

It’s trendy to talk about the power and use of UX and design in product development and banking digital transformation. However, banking transformation requires not only innovative features and great technology—a successful digital banking transformation means creating a product your users will love by integrating user experience and design into your development cycle.

This will help deliver solutions that not only provide the expected set of features, but create an emotional connection between the client and the solution. Simply put, in the financial services industry, UX has become a priority.

Recently, Murex initiated an UX-driven project head on, revamping its dealing desk for asset management.

The new features will be available to a larger community of Murex clients in early 2021, which is exciting on its own. What might be interesting about the solution for players in this space is how Murex approached the project. We assembled experts from different domains to better understand the client’s unique user journey and get to done.

Through this approach, we originated a new offer—having our business analysts and UX consultants work together at the same time throughout the product development process to truly understand and record the journey of these users.

Typically, business analysts would gather the requirement and design the UI alone. In this instance, we enlisted the skills and expertise of the Murex UX team’s Sarah Colmon, who would be tasked with understanding and documenting the user journey. As senior UX designer within the UX team, Sarah was ideally positioned to understand how to maximize navigational possibilities and how to access necessary data in a click—Sarah has expertise and training that business analysts do not have.

Traders from the client side collaborated with UX/UI designers, business analysts and developers from Murex. In this interaction as well as others with Murex, intense, close, iterative partnership with a client was key to our success: onboarding the client along the journey is part of our product development strategy. The MX.3 platform is routinely enhanced with a client-centric approach.

We began what we call “requirement gathering,” including the close documentation UX stories from traders. We wanted to go beyond the functional requirement of the client and to navigate and easily access information. We wanted to understand their landscape, essentially. We wanted to see what they were experiencing and working on a typical day. We were highly invested in becoming fluent in the user experience of Forex, interest rate derivative and equity trading.

Requirement gathering and analysis took place over four months and included weekly site visits from our team. Facetime was important (and could be replicated using virtual interaction tools). This gathering was followed by a multi-step iterative phase with the community of users: we demoed, gathered feedback, applied changes, and gathered more feedback, in a loop, over three months. We maintained an iterative approach throughout the development of the product, with meetings every few months to demo progress and gather feedback.

We gained an excellent understanding of the user journey and brought an integrated team approach, which helped us develop fit-to-purpose new features. Now that we know the approach bears fruit, we are excited to deploy it going forward.