Data UX · 2017
Bloomberg Connect
Designing for traders who read a screen faster than they read a sentence.
Defining the problem
The workday isn't black and white. But the calendar only knew free, busy, and tentative.
Bloomberg's culture of transparency meant employees treated the shared calendar as a communication tool, checking someone's schedule before ever messaging them. But there was no mobile way to look up a colleague or book a room away from a desk.
Over five trips to Bloomberg's New York headquarters, we trained on the terminal, sat with employees, and mapped what the calendar was actually being used for versus what it was designed to do.
Process
Five months of research — literature review, competitive analysis, contextual inquiry, and a method we invented called Sensory Association to surface how the calendar made people feel — before we wrote a single storyboard. That research became 100+ concepts, narrowed to 15 storyboards, and validated with 15 employees through speed dating.
Make it actionable
Every piece of information on the calendar should let someone act, not just read.
Prioritize relevant information
Surface what matters right now, not everything the calendar knows.
Keep it open and transparent
Work with Bloomberg's culture of visibility instead of designing against it.
Leverage the mobile context
Meet people where scheduling actually breaks down: away from their desk.
What we learned
Distrust, not workflow, was the real bug — and it made people redo the system's job by hand.
People faked meetings to protect focus time, tracked coworkers down in person to check real availability, and wandered the building for up to fifteen minutes hunting for an open room. Bloomberg Connect was designed around those workarounds rather than the calendar the org chart assumed people used — validated across five rounds of prototyping and think-aloud usability testing, then presented to a packed auditorium of Bloomberg executives, designers, and engineers.