298 DEVELOPING A WORKSTATION FOR STOCKTRADERS I V Burmistrov Russian Trading System Technical Centre and Moscow State University, Russia INTRODUCTION PROCESS Since Russia’s privatizations in 1992, activities have focused on developing an infrastructure to trade, clear and register corporate securities. The Russian Trading System (RTS), launched in July 1995, is Russia’s largest fully electronic system for over-the-counter (OTC) securities trading. Today, the RTS consists of over 1000 workstations throughout the nation and abroad, connected to servers which link to a central processing complex in Moscow. Analysis of user activity for the stocktraders’ population The usability team began with field studies of stocktraders’ tasks and organizational structure of their work. To elicit users’ task structure and formulate system requirements, dozens user interviews were conducted using an ethnographic interview approach (1). Each interview was accompanied by detailed observations on the actual dealing rooms. Using the data from the videotaped interviews and observation, a comprehensive task analysis was executed. Following execution of the task analysis for the existing tasks, additional new functions were identified and factored into the existing task structure to form a complete set of system requirements. The RTS Technical Centre (RTS TC) was founded in October 1995 as a technical support centre to operate the RTS. Its main objective is to provide financial mar- kets operators with technological tools to perform trading, manage front office and back office activities, organize the transmission of the data between the trading system, broker-dealer firms, clearing and settlement institutions, control authorities and to the public. Main difficulties in our work were that (a) many of our users were persons with very high social status – in many cases, it was impossible to conduct conventional requirements gathering and usability testing procedures, and (b) very high level of secrecy in users’ work – many of them treated usability team members as a kind of information insiders appeared in their firms. RTS TC is a service-oriented company. Our customers do not “buy” a product useful to solve a problem, they rather “entrust” the company to the solution of the problem, complete with the responsibility of updating the solution according to the stock market regulations modification and new developments in the stock market infrastructure. We overcame these difficulties mainly through pains- taking analysis of massive recordings of traders’ nego- tiations via chat facility. Supplementary method of information gathering was administration of question- naires conducted via the Internet. From the very beginning, the building of the on-line trading system became the focal point of RTS TC activities. Initially, RTS traders used Portal™ software developed by NASDAQ. That was an obsolete character-based system with heavy keyboard operation. In September 1996, RTS started “from scratch” redevelopment of the stocktrader workstation for Microsoft Windows environment. The RTS TC formed a multidisciplinary redesign team whose skills included project management, software engineering, human factors and usability engineering. In August 1998, after two years of analysis, prototyping, usability evaluation, software engineering and coding, the new RTS Plaza workstation was launched. After formulating general principles of the new system, we developed paper prototypes of the new user interface and collected feedback from its prospective users. Then, programming team developed first runnable prototype of the system that has been installed in about twenty broker-dealer firms. The feedback from beta-testers has been collected and used for refinement of the user interface. Stocktraders activities in the OTC trading The OTC market has no trading centers. Instead, it consists of hundreds of brokerage firms located throughout the country and doing business by computer network and telephone. Firms in the OTC market are generally referred to as “broker-dealers”, because they can sell and buy securities either as brokers (agents) or In the following sections, we describe the effort of usability engineering team within the project and discuss lessons learned from development of user inter- face for such a specific workplace as that of stocktrader. People in Control: An International Conference on Human Interfaces in Control Rooms, Cockpits and Command Centres, Conference Publication No. 463, The Institution of Electrical Engineers, 1999