Adaptive | MTS Markets

Overview

At Adaptive Financial Consulting, I re-envisioned and redesigned MTS BondsPro, a fixed-income electronic trading platform with 500+ institutional participants and EUR 100B+ average daily volumes. Used a user-centric approach to interface and workflow design to produce designs that are visually appealing, intuitive, and practically deliverable. The workflow-driven design methodology was later published as industry thought leadership.

Objectives

• Redesign the MTS BondsPro trading interface for institutional fixed-income markets with 500+ participants
• Design real-time trading workflows: watchlists, aggressor flow, last look, depth of market, and order management
• Solve trade ticket screen clutter through innovative stacking and layout concepts
• Create a scalable design system with light/dark themes, component library, and iconography
• Keep UX designs at least two sprints ahead of engineering to accelerate delivery

Approach & Activities

• Conducted expert interviews in the discovery phase to uncover pain points, identify important challenges, and define goals
• Combined immersive interactive design sessions and workshops to expedite moving from concepts to high-fidelity visuals and prototypes
• Applied workflow-driven design to align cross-functional teams, focus on clear goals, and shorten the product development cycle
• Created user journeys, sketches, and storyboards of potential solutions to problems with the highest impact to business
• Delivered high-quality visual designs with thoughtful documentation: wireframes, high-fidelity designs, and prototypes defining the visual language and UI theme for the entire application
• Created a design system covering all UI areas: themes, buttons, color palette, calendar pickers, tooltips, form fields, and iconography

Challenges & Lessons

• Legacy platform had rich features built over many years but became challenging to support and extend
• New UI had to function familiarly to avoid alienating MTS' existing 500+ participant client base
• Tight 5-month delivery timeline from discovery through complete platform delivery
• The back-end matching engine was out of scope for change; the new UI had to integrate seamlessly with the existing architecture

Impact