From complex to simple: evolution of mobile trading terminal interfaces



    The stock market is a high-tech and highly competitive industry, where significant attention is paid to the reliability and speed of the solutions used. To this end, technologies are being developed for direct access to the exchange bypassing broker systems, fast data transfer protocols and new generation trading terminals (directly inside which you can "collect" robots for trading).

    In addition, the style of many merchants implies constant monitoring of the market situation in order to be able to respond to changing conditions. All this led to the fact that the era of mobility in the stock market (including the Russian one) came more than 10 years ago, much earlier than in some other sectors.

    In our today's topic, we will look at how the interfaces of mobile trading terminals have changed ( using ITinvest as an example ).

    A bit of history: Windows Mobile, the Start menu, and the stylus


    Awareness of the need to create a mobile trading application came to us at the beginning of the 2000s. As a result, in 2003 ITinvest was the first Russian broker (and one of the first in Europe) to complete the development of the Pocket Trade mobile terminal for devices running Windows Mobile 2003 .



    A device running Windows Mobile, controlled with a stylus.

    This operating system in many ways repeated the paradigm of Microsoft's desktop OS - for example, there was a Start menu and folders with program files.



    Pocket Trade application shortcut in the program folder on a device with Windows Mobile

    An important point - interaction with the interface of the operating system and applications was then carried out using a stylus.

    This made it possible to make a mobile terminal that is practically as good as its desktop counterpart in its functionality - users could receive real-time information about their accounts, orders and deals, view charts, enter orders to buy or sell (including those with a complex combination of parameters) view stock news.



    The queue of applications and the application input window PocketTrade

    A large number of different settings were also available (including design and fonts):



    PocketTrade settings window and application input window in horizontal orientation

    The general similarity of the mobile OS to the desktop XP that was familiar at that time, the application’s extensive trading capabilities and the possibility of its flexible settings contributed to the growth of its popularity.

    However, in the beginning and the middle of the two thousandth point on the mobile device market, the rules were completely different for the operating system - the Symbian platform, which by 2004 had a 88% market share. It was impossible to ignore this system, which means thousands of users of Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Motorola devices.

    Web version for Symbian


    It must be understood that in 2003-2004 there was no fast and cheap mobile Internet, so it was necessary to ensure minimal traffic consumption. To do this, the version for Windows Mobile implemented the function of stopping updates, but when the user turned them on, the amount of data pumped turned out to be large anyway.

    In many ways, it was decided to make the trading terminal for Symbian browser-based (this also allowed to remove the problem of installing the application - in the era before the App Store and Google Play it was all more complicated). Actually, thanks to the “browser”, users of any mobile devices (and even PCs) could ultimately use Pocket Trade Web .

    Among the functions of the new terminal was viewing the status of the account and portfolio, quotation tables, charts, news and the execution of trading operations.

    This is what the application input window looked like:



    And this is the graphs of the cost of financial instruments:



    Having a web version of the terminal and an option for Windows Mobile made it possible to reach most of the users of mobile devices. For several years it was, and then there was a revolution, led by Steve Jobs.

    “Who needs a stylus?”


    iPhone quickly broke into the market and changed it very quickly - a huge number of complex devices with incomprehensible interfaces went to the dustbin of history. The Apple iOS operating system was “sharpened” under the control of a finger, not a stylus, because “each of us already has 10 styluses,” said Jobs.



    Even the Android operating system fell under a certain influence of the iOS touch-approach - the first demos of Google OS were quite different from what the system became by the day of release. One of the main differences - at the beginning in Android, touch control was used to a lesser extent.

    Finger control has changed the way users interact with the application - and this has already resulted in a radical reformatting of the interfaces of mobile terminals.

    Finger control is easier and more natural (and therefore more convenient) than working with a stylus. However, this manipulator is much thinner, and with its help you can perform more complex actions. The proliferation of touch interfaces has led to larger controls in applications, and a variety of prompts for entering data have appeared.

    For example, the window for entering an order in the iSmart iOS application and the version of the Android application looks like this :



    The order input window in the ITinvest mobile terminals - iSmart for iOS and Android

    Compared with the same window of the old Pocket Trade for Windows Phone, the number of interface elements and settings has significantly decreased. In contrast, navigation menus and buttons for performing operations have become much larger - this has allowed to speed up the data entry process.

    In just a few years since the release of the iPhone, the interfaces, including trading applications, have changed significantly. The stylus, it would seem, is completely gone, but history can make another sharp turn.

    What will happen next


    After the death of Steve Jobs, Apple was led by Tim Cook, whose vision on many issues of the company's product development does not coincide with what his former boss declared. For example, Jobs was not eager to release small tablets and large smartphones, but the iPad Mini and iPhone 6 Plus have long been on store shelves.

    Now the media is discussing the possible release of Apple's own stylus. It is reported that it can be released in 2015 and will work with an oversized iPad:



    Of course, this does not mean that Apple's stylus will work with its smartphones. However, the fact that the size of the iPhone is gradually approaching the size of the tablets suggests that such a course of events cannot be ruled out.

    Be that as it may, the re-arrival of styluses (WaCom) now on tablets is contributing to the emergence of competition between these devices and desktops, whose OS is increasingly moving towards finger interfaces. In addition, with the release of the new Windows 10, which is likely to introduce a common core for all types of OS (mobile, tablets, desktops), the competition between mobile terminals and “ordinary” ones may disappear altogether. A few years later, it is quite possible that a terminal has two different interfaces, “tailored” for work in a mobile environment and on a desktop computer.

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