Forex News at Oanda

Leveraging information from market and news events to support trading decisions

Role: Product design lead

Duration: 1 month

Team: Design manager

About Forex trading

Trading is the buying and selling of goods with the intention of making a profit. Oanda’s trading platform allows its clients to trade currency. For instance, I could buy Euros when they are cheap and sell them when their price goes up to make a profit. The cost of a currency is constantly fluctuating, like the stock market, and is dependent on a number of external factors.

It is good practice for traders to know what is going on in the world so they can be aware of how prices are changing. That is why traders need the news.

Current experience

Research & problem definition

• User interviews revealed that the current News feed did not provide enough information for users to make well-informed decisions
• Users would use third-party Forex news platforms to read News feeds and return to Oanda to make trades

Solution

Highlights

• Pairs quantitative data (i.e. charts and history) to qualitative data from the news article itself
• Traders are most confident when they can cross-reference quantitative and qualitative data

Results

Comparing the current experience to the redesign with 10 forex traders

Highlights

• The redesign better supports trading needs by 10%
• The redesign is more informative by 20%
• The redesign increases trading confidence by 20%

Highlights

• About 70% of participants prefer the redesign over the current design

Some earlier design explorations

There are so many daily news events that traders will only dig deeper into high and sometimes medium priority events. Option 4 was chosen because the colours created visual saliency towards important news events.

Traders need to trust the news that is provided to them. Visually, the rounded corners on the cards were too playful.

Learnings

Designing for an interesting user group

Traders are interesting people! Personally, I would love to watch a Netflix documentary on the world of forex trading. A lot of decisions they make are very psychological and that’s why it’s so interesting to design for them; you really have to understand how they think.

The importance of benchmarking

I think one thing I would have liked to do would have been benchmarking the current experience. I didn’t get a chance to do that, and tried to make up for it with an A/B test, but I think taking to a client and explicitly asking them about the current experience before doing anything else would have been more valuable, apart from providing me with starting metrics. I might have been able get to the crux of the problem faster, and I still feel like I’m missing an important issue that hasn’t been discovered.