REAL-TIME MARGIN IMPACT
fidelity.com
The Real-Time Margin Impact tool was a small project that turned into a big project, half of which never got built. I worked very closely with the business analysts and product owners on this project, due to the nature of the subject matter. Margin is hard for customers to understand. It's complicated, arbitrary, and changes without notice. One of the most frustrating things about margin is how difficult it is to figure out how changes to your account, like trades, affect your balances.
This tool attempted to help users quantify the impact of placing a trade before it happened, something fairly new and innovative in the industry.
We followed three principles while designing this tool.
-
Less is more
-
Do the math for the user
-
Simplify using progressive disclosure
With these in mind, the tool we built helps our most active and profitable customers stay out of margin calls and continue to trade.
LESS IS MORE
I'll say it again. Margin is hard. Even some of the customers using it don't really understand how it works.
The key to the design was not showing everything we could. Though even limiting the cognitive load down to the bare essential wasn't enough, we had to use progressive disclosure to simplify even further.
PROGRESSIVE DISCLOSURE
Expanding and collapsing each element seems like overkill, and it probably was for users with just a few positions, but our best customers have dozens or even hundreds of positions. We used every trick we could think of to narrow down the field of view to only the relevant data on the security the user is targeting, without compromising the integrity of the tool.
DO THE MATH
Too often in financial services, we assume the user can just "do the math". For example, we show two numbers, and the interesting part of those two numbers is the ratio. But we don't show that. We just show the two numbers.
On this tool, we tried very hard to do all the math. To show the interesting part of the numbers. The ratios and differences, factors and sums. I think it makes a complex tool that much easier to use.