Meridian
Meridian's platform had grown by accretion. Every new instrument added a panel, every panel added a tab, and the interface that once fit a screen had become something traders navigated from memory rather than from sight.
The brief we were handed asked for a visual refresh. Three days of watching people actually trade told us the visual layer was not the problem — the information hierarchy was. Traders were holding state in their heads because the screen would not hold it for them.
We also found that the busiest users had quietly built their own workarounds: spreadsheets open on a second monitor, sticky notes on bezels, a shared document of keyboard shortcuts nobody had documented officially.
We rewrote the problem as a single question — what does this trader need in the next four seconds? — and pushed everything that failed that test down one layer. It made the redesign a subtraction exercise rather than an addition one.
Rather than designing an elegant empty state and hoping it survived reality, we started with the busiest account in the system and worked backwards. If it held at maximum density, everything lighter came free.
Forty-one components, tokenised and documented, so the in-house team could build the next twenty screens without us. That handover was written into the contract from week one.
Task completion rose 64% in the first quarter after launch, measured against the same cohort on the old interface. Time-to-first-action dropped by just under half.
The number we watch more closely: support tickets tagged "can't find" fell by 81%. The workarounds went away because they stopped being necessary.
Results
Task completion
Design to launch
Design direction
Aktays
Design system
Aktays
Front-end build
Aktays + Meridian platform team
Research
Aktays
Next project
Travel planning without the twenty open tabs