I suspect Bloomberg terminals fit that bill.
That's super fascinating. There's an entire industry that runs off these things, on their totally custom UI, showing everything from stock tickers to news headlines to maps? That must be a fun project to work on (except probably the finance users don't like random UI changes, lol).
Anyway, I wish I got to encounter this system earlier in my career... would've loved to experiment with a UI like that! News ticker under a real time map that you can use to drill down to specific regions to see what's going on? It's fascinating.
And it looks like their map is using some sort of serverside raster tiling where even simple arrows have to be redrawn on different zoom levels... just random things I'd be eager to try to improve.
You can fairly quickly get to a point where your investments go up (or down, but more often up) more in a day than your monthly income.
OTC (things that don't trade on exchanges) markets are a lot closer to ebay or facebook marketplace than many realise, for example, e.g. you ask for a price, possibly haggle a bit, say you want it, behind-the-scenes people scurry off and actually make it happen.
When you first activate your terminal bloomberg send you an email congratulating you on joining "the exclusive club" (this is exaggerated, they want you to feel special, but there's truth to it).
As well as all that bloomberg is technically also still (iirc) one of the largest private computer networks.
> That must be a fun project to work on
Unfortunately possibly quite the opposite for many, although no first-hand experience.
Wait, so inside Bloomberg there's like a huge IRC/Discord chat room for all the world's finance people? How does anyone keep up with that kind of volume? I can't even stay on top of my own company's Slack.
I have bad news for you, nobody who works with a system more than casually, likes random UI changes. NOBODY. Younger people are often more tolerant to these distractions, because they are often more curious. But when you have used a tool for some longer time, and suddenly it looks or behaves different, that erodes trust. That forces the user to turn of the mental autopilot and to proceed with care. Which A/B tests will report as increased engagement of the users. And there is our vicious cycle.
Note, how a scheduled update with release notes does the opposite. It increases trust, because it tells you what is going to happen and then it happens. (Hopefully)
As for the UI: I wish more things were like bloomberg, but bloomberg itself can be slightly hobbled by wanting to lay everything out as a table all the time when a custom chart designed by a creative domain-expert would be almost as useful.
* Why change to something that's "almost as useful" .. that's a downgrade.
* Pretty is often the enemy of Consistent.
On that second point, it doesn't have to be .. but it can take a great deal more effort to have data presentation that's both creative and consistent and dense.
The domain goals here are rapid navigation of dense infomation across tens of thousands of companies, timespans, portfolios, groupings, comparisons, etc. With a good interface the user quickly finds the desired scope and view and automatically eye tracks to the wanted figures.
It's not an interface for pretty board room presentations (although in an organisation that promotes based on merit in the ditches most senior staff would be familiar with a Bloomberg Board) - it's a daily driver for engine room.
I'm not defending this specific interface, just highlighting what is common to many similar domain tools.
To clarify: There would be two modes, for example, when looking at the prices of options you might want to see the shape of the smile (e.g. equivalent to the markets view of a certain probability distribution), but when trading a specific option you want to know everything about it down to exact prices.
it's not about pretty-ness, indeed some of these charts can be completely incomprehensible, but rather density.
Our UIs should be more than just Excel-but-not-in-Excel!
> there are a lot of support staff who have bloomberg.