Northern Light

STATE STREET

Northern Light is a desktop application created by the Technology Research Group within State Street. The platform provides services and tools to help internal trading partners service clients quickly and accurately.

Team

1 Product Designer (myself)
1 Design Researcher
4 Backend Engineers
1 Frontend Engineer

Uncovering the problem

We traveled across the country to observe all aspects of ground-level trading. We (two engineers and one designer) spent 189 hours in observation and discovery. We found unnecessarily complex workflows, outdated software, and communication gaps.

Example of the trading tools before our project

Our goal

Our goal was to create a modern application that streamlined trading workflows, generated revenue by cutting back on hours spent doing manual tasks while following all government financial regulations.

Process

Through our user interviews, we began to identify several pillars for the team to create a tool around. These pillars would significantly improve the efficiency and experience for both State Street’s clients as well as these operations teams.

  1. Single app destination

  2. Real-time feed of data

  3. Single source of truth/data with multiple lenses along

  4. Built-in contextual communication

As our engineers began to build the backend for this new tool. The design team crafted personas and user journeys and product flows.

After user testing, we refined and began design explorations of our early dashboard experinece.

Solving the problem

In order to simplify the trader’s workflow and get them out of Excel we built Northern Light which was a personalized front-end experience dashboard that created customized views based on the user’s role (client, trade-ops, sec-master ops, etc.).

Northern Light allowed users to monitor all trades and communicate with their team members for checks without having to leave the app. This saved the team hours of work and miscommunication.

Results & Impact

In its current form, Northern Light will replace over 30 applications and streamline workflows for thousands of employees company-wide. Before I left the company, our product was in use by one trading team with about 100 members. There acting as our experimental team.

Our future goal is to open the platform to an external client. We hope this will aid the large communication gap between internal and external processes.