Overview

OpenDoor Trading was creating a brand new product that needed to be innovative. However the trading community had long held expectations about how trading interfaces behave and low tolerance for traditional user studies and adopting new usability paradigms.

The traditional US Treasury market structure has become ineffective at meetings today’s challenges of heightened financial regulation and has resulted in diminished liquidity. The time is ripe for a new platform that provides superior execution, balance sheet compression, anonymous trading and greater liquidity. OpenDoor aimed to pioneer such a solution.

The Challenge

  • Creating something “innovative but familiar” with highly gated access to the user community
  • Deep financial specificity that required true intimacy with underlying market data
  • Completing low-risk build with Broadway Technology-developed ledger, auction protocol and clearing software.

Our Solution

Expero created a novel user experience for the new web-based platform that has far exceeded OpenDoor’s user adoption goals!

  • 1.0 Release April 2017 - Expero architected, designed and developed fully functional web-based platform with the same information density and reactivity traders have come to rely on in their desktop systems.
  • Traders have embraced the OpenDoor platform by placing 100,000,000+ orders within the first 30 days.
  • Expero also built an interactive sales demo that was used ahead of the 1.0 Release to socialize the new platform and an ensure an active market upon launch.

User Audience

  • Sell-Side Broker/Dealers
  • Buy-Side Traders
  • Risk Managers
  • Desk Trading Managers

Services & Capabilities

  • Product discovery and user experience design
  • Extensive product owner and user interviews & design sessions
  • Front-end UI Development (e.g., HTML, CSS, Javascript)
  • (Back-end built by Expero partner Broadway Technology)
  • Build environment creation and maintenance, production support
  • Standalone fully functional sales prototype simulating the backend trading platform

Project Details

  • 3 months to prototypes & demos, 12 months to market opening, continuous improvement thereafter
  • 3-6 person team
  • Agile UX, development and prototyping process

Our Approach

From Initial Idea To Auction Platform In 6 Months!

Financial industry veterans saw a market opportunity born out of new, post-recession regulations. From a 100+ page vision document, they needed to bring a new product to the marketplace with no known competitors or comparables. OpenDoor had a vision, but didn’t know what it needed to look like, and how its users would engage

Designed For An Expert User Audience

A financial services startup founded by the Head of Fixed Income Trading at Deutsche Bank identified a flaw in the US Treasuries market. A novel experience was mandatory to assure enough market participants to make the idea worthwhile. But in this market, innovation can be dangerous: buttons can move ten million dollars in a moment.

A carefully designed auction protocol can ensure the anonymity required for this illiquid market can trade fairly. However that protocol must be transparent and intuitive to experienced traders for the market to function.

* The product is intended to create and support a market that does not yet exist. The Market doesn't work without participants, and participants need to be sold to. How do you demo a market before it opens?

* Traders need an intuitive UX, but also an app that updates interactively and in real time. Traders do not conform to “standard” user behaviors when interfacing with technology; they are looking at multiple windows on multiple stacked screens, and they can consume lines and lines of data with amazing speed.

World-class user experience design was only step one. Expero constructed a web interface with the same information density and reactivity traders have come to rely on in their desktop systems. A maintainable web-based system fosters faster adoption and easier feature updates.

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