A screen comparing Credit Default Swap prices on the iconic Bloomberg terminal.

I am fascinated with the Bloomberg terminal and its inscrutable interface. To use it is to be at the center of an elite membership of global financerati.  If one of these $1500 a month machines is on your desk, for your exclusive use, it is a sign of your arrival. Everything about its physical presence communicates its primary affordance, exclusivity. The outward appearance, which has changed little since the introduction of the original “Bloomberg Box” in the early 1980s, seems to say you’re probably too stupid to even use me. But if I’m on your desk, then you, my friend, are one serious cat.

Perhaps my personal fascination stems from my six years working at Reuters, who, along with Dow Jones, invented the market for real-time computerized financial data only to watch themselves become marginalized by Bloomberg on one side (the high end of the market) and Thomson on the other  (the low end of the market.)  In the mid-1990s if you had a Reuters terminal on your desk you were probably a retail equities trader in Omaha, not a swinging dick, master-of-the-universe type in New York or London.  This competitive weakness, which led to severe troubles at the company, affected me personally.   As I was being laid off in 2003, along with my entire department, I am certain that I muttered Damn you, Bloomberg! more than once.

This Bloomberg terminal is available for public use at La Guardia airport.

I also live in New York City, where the billionaire founder of the company, Michael Bloomberg, went on to become our iconoclastic and effective three term mayor.  His long reign has overlapped with practically my entire tenure here, and it’s hard to argue that he has been anything short of a windfall for the world’s most ungovernable city. This second act incarnation as a hyper-competent public reformer only deepens my interest in the factor behind his original success.   His fortune, with his Bermuda weekend place and his helicopters and his Upper Eastside townhouse, was built on the back of this clumsy black retro terminal with its arcane devotion to keyboard shortcuts and an MS-DOS era interface.

But really, when I think about it most deeply,  I’m obsessed with the insidious aura of the machine itself.  It was  at the center of every last one of the financial calamities that have marked the past decade.  The machine stands as an enduring reminder that some of the best and brightest brains of our generation have squandered their talent in the pursuit of ruinous financial engineering.  To think of the sheer number of credit default swaps, sub-prime MBSs, and other troubled asset crapola that traded hands as people were staring at this interface is truly astounding. Sure, that’s like blaming the axe for the bloody killing spree, but think about it.  There were many, many players and personalities involved in the “systemic” nature of the financial crisis,  but the Bloomberg was always in the room.

It's not difficult to find pictures of devastated looking traders in front of their Bloomberg terminals circa 2008, at the height of the financial crisis. This one is from the NY Times.

I have tried to use a Bloomberg terminal only once.  It was set-up in the departure lounge at La Guardia airport for one of the shuttle flights between New York and Boston.   I was traveling with Mark Safire, my first mentor in this field, on the way somewhere to conduct a usability study for a client.  We started playing with the terminal and, after about a minute, were giggling and cracking jokes about it.  Others, whose job it was not to make fun of obscurantism in the design of computer interfaces, probably would not have been amused (intimidated, more likely).   Bloomberg apologists would surely be unconcerned by our ridicule.  In fact, I can imagine them leaning back in their chairs, ordering another bottle of Vosne Romanee, and toasting the fact that the plebes are still unaware of the true power of the machine.

The only valid reason explaining why the Bloomberg design will not change is the behavior of its users. Users who favor complexity and clutter over efficiency and clarity to sustain a fictive status symbol.  – UX Magazine

The last time I was this disoriented in front of a computer was when I was 14 playing the adventure game, Zork, on my Apple IIc.   The Zork interface, which was nothing but a command line prompt, required a user to type in text commands and then see what would happen.  In Zork, I eventually had to draw my own map on a sheet of notebook paper so I could retain a mental model of the game’s environment somewhere outside of my own short-term memory.  With my home-grown navigational aid, I transformed the tacit into the explicit, and I was forced to do this completely outside of the context of the product and its design.   The Bloomberg also relies on a lot of external context development for successful use.  Some of this context comes in the form of the training workshops, extensive help resources, or the on-screen cheat sheets that the company provides.  The proprietary keyboard design, with its custom hard-keys that are a necessary part of most user interactions, is another non-UI technique to put usage queues out there “in the world.”  Most knowledge on how to use the Bloomberg is developed, Zork-like, over time, within the mind of the user by sheer trial and error.   To learn to master the Bloomberg on a Wall Street trading floor is part of the testosterone-fueled, gamified climate of the place.  It is not difficult to find Bloomberg users who use the term “addiction” when talking about how they feel about using it.  If it was made any easier to use, say with a cutesy “point and click” interface, graphics, white-space, readable typography, careful use (versus garish use) of contrast, or any other attempt at “user-friendliness,” then the whole point of the thing is at risk.    It’s like a scratch golfer who favors a forged iron blade over one of those big cast aluminum blades like Ping first introduced in the 1980s.  The sweet spot is the size of a dime on the forged club but the expert golfer considers it to be purpose-built, and therefore superior, to the club that’s designed to be more forgiving for those who never learned to swing the thing in the first place.

Look no further than NASA's Mission Control to see the source of the Bloomberg's screen design cues. It is the look of serious people doing serious business.

A heatmap visualization of oil prices in the U.S. on a Bloomberg Terminal. The look is right out of a spy movie.

The reflective aspects of the Bloomberg’s design success are well understood.  When IDEO redesigned the terminal, celebrity make-over style, for the magazine Portfolio in 2007, they acknowledged the fact that customers prided themselves on their ability to navigate the complex machines and went so far as to work in a game-like system where users’ expertise was tracked and displayed publicly to other users. (Note: this design was passed on by Bloomberg L.P. and never saw the light of day.)  Jakob Nielsen, interviewed for the same article, praised the terminal for its flexibility in letting users configure their screens into “data dumps” – useful for scanning and pattern recognition – but dismissed other aspects of the design such as its use of black backgrounds and contrasty yellow or orange text and graphic colors.   But as you can see if you look at my post on F1 Telemetry interfaces, the black background on terminal-style interfaces is an established idiom in serious “engineering” cultures where real-time, data centric analysis is high-stakes business.  This look and feel is clearly cultivated, and If you want to know where it originates, bringing to bear the full emotional and dramatic weight of serious people conducting serious business, look no further than NASA’s mission control.   Finance may not be exactly “engineering,” but in our modern world of quantitative trading and complex derivatives, I doubt anybody ever looked over someone’s shoulder who is using a Bloomberg terminal and said “Dude, this isn’t rocket science.”  These days, it more or less is.

The IDEO redesign of the Bloomberg Terminal that was done for a feature in Portfolio Magazine in 2007.

Bloomberg’s early advantage in the market data terminal business was in the proprietary analytics built-in to the terminal, particularly for bond traders, not in the real-time “ticker” information.   Real-time price data was, and remains, a commodity.    It’s the capability of using it for value-added analysis, and perhaps the perception of being purpose-built for analysis, that really makes this thing sing.  When Bloomberg users cite reasons for why they love their machine, they define it as the very essence of usability, not complexity.   In fact, its weaknesses from a design perspective are often the very elements that the users praise.   Its contrasty interface is lauded for the ability to be started at for hours upon hours with minimal eyestrain.   The keyboard shortcuts are viewed as some sort of advanced “help” system.  Read this blog post, 6 reasons I love my Bloomberg, to see what I mean.   The best design choices in the Bloomberg, like the integrated 24/7 real-time help that’s available by pressing a function key, are what most people in my profession would consider anti-design choices.  But users are cultish in their devotion to Bloomberg exactly because of these sorts of features.   Let’s face it, these people know their audience.   The Bloomberg terminal’s branding success was in being able to successfully position itself as something developed by a trader, for traders.   The fact that the terminal’s functionality and design reinforces this message down to the last keystroke is why it belongs in the emotional design hall of fame.

Further Reading from Around the Web:

Screen Gems,  Portfolio Magazine

The Impossible Bloomberg Makeover,  UX Magazine

The September, 2009 Issue of Wired

For several years now, I’ve been showing a screen capture of the craigslist.org home page to audiences at various presentations on usability.   I ask a simple question.   Is this website usable?   The audience members, who are generally students, programmers and business people and not members of the design community, invariably return a resounding yes in response to my question.  It’s taken for granted.  Craigslist, in all it’s glorious straightforwardness, defines usable.  Then I proceed to show them how the design breaks a lot of rules – at least by the conventional wisdom of modern web UI designers.   For instance, the craigslist home page is crammed full and almost completely lacks any sense of visual heirarchy or prioritization.   It provides little to no opportunity for serendipitous discovery of content, only myriad starting options for those who already know what they are looking for.   It’s chock-full of cryptic abbreviations.  It’s un-visual.  It squanders precious screen real-estate on seldom used features.  For instance, a full third of the screen is devoted to displaying all the cities where the various Craigslists are located – something which the average user rarely, if ever,  has the need to change.  Let’s face it, this site  is a usability train wreck, right?

Well, few people think so.  In fact, most think the opposite.   The September issue of Wired hits the newstands soon and the cover story is called “The Tragedy of Craigslist.” The article is a fascinating take on the world’s greatest anti-brand and the Forest Gump-like savants who run it.  But at the heart of the piece is a condemnation of Craigslist’s stubborn refusal to evolve it’s UI design and functionality.   “On this site, contrary to every principle of usability and common sense, you can’t easily browse pictures of the apartments for rent.”    The job postings are a “wasteland of hypertext links, one line after another, without recommendations or networking features or even protection against duplicate postings.”  The author, Gary Wolf, rightfully acknowledges craiglist.org’s role as a cultural force and community asset.  Indeed, he’s almost offended that the People’s greatest online resource is so stuck in 1995.   Don’t the plebes deserve better?   Wired goes so far as to commission four “extreme makover” redesigns of the Craigslist homepage by top designers, including a team from Obama’s site and one from the NYTimes.com.     All in all, it’s a great piece of writing, and the makeover feature is a lot of fun and I hope they make it a regular feature.   After all, serious criticism of UI is rare compared to other cultural works such as books or movies, and I’m thrilled to see it here.

Most People Consider This Highly Usable. Why?

But they missed the point of why the site works in the first place.  It’s anti-design is no accident at this point.  In fact it’s carefully curated as the Craigslist “brand.”   This design screams utilitarian “grass roots” community content that’s built from the ground up.   The fact that there is not a professional designer within a 1000 miles of the place is exactly where the site’s authority comes from – and Craig Newmark knows this.   The site was already comparitavely underdesigned when it was launched in it’s modern incarnation in 1998.  The results of that exercise that I do in my presentations would seem to indicate that the branding works.  This site is perceived as more usable than almost anything else out there.    This gap between how a user values something because it suits their behavior and how they value it because it hits them on a contemplative, reflective level is at the heart of modern user experience design.  Don Norman sounded the call to think this way in Emotional Design, and here’s a great example of the reflective aspects of good design in play.   If Craigslist adopted one of the makeover designs in the magazine article they might be dead in the water (although I must admit the contestants showed great restraint and stayed more or less true to the “brand.”)  Another example of a product like this is the Bloomberg terminal – a usability nightmare of dense screens and arcane keyboard shortcuts whose users define their self-worth and status in their Wall St. milieu based on their ability to use it.    Somewhere in portraying the Craigslist guys as the Internet’s biggest Neanderthals, they seem to have missed the point that the end result is pure UX genius.