Merrill Lynch needed to create a web portal for Direct Markets, a major strategic initiative to drive new business models and technology innovation across all products and services for the firm’s institutional clients.
MAYA designed the web portal, the MLX brand for Direct Markets, and many other artifacts that deliver an experience with the MLX brand.
User Study
MAYA’s contextual investigation for MLX served as a powerful point of interaction and communication between customers and the business people providing the site. We studied users to ensure that we built the right tools that would help real people make critical decisions in complex, technology-rich, high-stress environments. Our interdisciplinary design team became part of their frenetic environment. We engaged them between flurries of buy and sell orders by squeezing in targeted queries, testing ideas, sketching, making connections — listening to people who were delighted to have a voice in shaping their future tools. Based on these user studies, we created user profiles, or personas, that defined which aspects of the system are important to users. In the process, MAYA gained domain knowledge and helped Merrill Lynch define business needs in a way that guaranteed optimal user experiences for their customers.
Information Architecture
After identifying users, their common tasks, and key scenarios, we categorized page types and documented navigational flow. Detailed specifications, templates, and sample code provided Merrill Lynch with the tools they needed to deploy and maintain the web site.
Best institutional brokerage Web Site. – Financial NetNews
Interface
MAYA designed a new identity and a web portal to Merrill Lynch research, market commentary and analysis, new issue offerings, secondary trading for debt and equity, and post-trade reporting. Because of the global distribution of Merrill Lynch customers, we designed the portal’s user interface to support several languages. MAYA created style guides, reference manuals, and templates that make it easy to consistently implement the MLX identity across many other artifacts that deliver a brand experience to users: press releases, installation CDs, PowerPoint presentations, and trade show exhibit booths.
Results
The Merrill Lynch MLX site for institutional investors went live only six months after our first sketch. MLX became the benchmark against which other firms measure their success.