Thursday, June 12, 2008

Consulted Wanted - UI Design, WPF (nice to have)

I have some $$$ in my consulting budget to hire a great UI designer for about 6 months to help us in our Complex Event Processing effort. We want to design a UI that will blow the traders and the business folks away. Something that far away from the endless myriad of grids that you see on most trading floors. If you know the names Tufte and Few, then you are pointing inthe right direction.

For the UI, we are using WPF (ie: sorry, no web developers). We are dealing with alerting on real-time data, so experience in working with real-time is desired, but not required.

The consultant has to have a track record of designing compelling user interfaces, and prior capital markets experience is highly desireable. In order to consider the consultant, we need to see samples of prior work, and we will check your references in order to convince ourselves that the consultant was the one who did the major design work on the UI, not someone who dragged a ChartFX control into a form.

The consultant does not have to be a developer (in fact, we would prefer someone who wasn't a developer), but has to be aware of what it takes to get your designs into code. This means that the consultant cannot give us an artistic masterpiece that is impossible to implement.

The consultant will work with us 4 or 5 days a week, ON-SITE, on the Equities trading floor in the Tribeca section of Manhattan. This means we don't want to hear from consulting firms in Toronto and India who want to know if the work can be outsourced. I am telling you right now ... we will never be outsourcing any part of this project. The consultant need to see the white of the eyes of our traders.


Here is a little more from Scott, who is doing UI development on my team:

Ability to gather user requirements and design and create the visual assets of the application is critical. Comfort with XAML design tools such as Microsoft Expression Blend is highly preferred. Prior experience with Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash are good indicators.

Person will be responsible for designing the look and feel of different business event indicators, along with overall application styling.


©2008 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved.
All opinions here are personal, and have no relation to my employer.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good lord, get over yourself. You're writing a bunch of over-engineered display tools for traders, most of whom would be equally happy using an Excel spreadsheet. That's one step above cleaning the fuzz out of their mouse balls. I don't see where you get the "I'm Mr. Hardcore Wall Street Programmer" attitude. Must be the great mental feat of hand-coding XAML.

marc said...

I fully understand that a trader and his Excel are inseparable. But, the directive has come from up high in our trading organization that they want to go way beyond Excel, and it's our mission to try to carry out this directive.

And I have never touched XAML .... I leave that the the WPF experts on the team. I would still be writing to B800H if I had my way!

bradutz01 said...

At www.xamltemplates.net you can see themes and there is one for free you can download with all the wpf controls themed.