Some of the world's biggest contracts are negotiated through a complicated and expensive web of communications. As part of the inhouse team at GLX Digital, I collaborated with users from commodities companies both big and small to unearth challenges around price discovery. My role was to streamline and consolidate commodity contract negotiation, which resulted in an intuitive workflow that played a major part in setting price expectations for the lithium spot market. The result is the SaaS platform 'GLX Connect'.

NB: The spot market is where cargoes are sold on a more immediate and small-scale basis.

ROLE:
UX Design
UI Design
UX Research

CLIENTS:
Pilbara Minerals
Fortescue (FMG)
Woodside Energy
Shell

YEAR:
2019 - 2023

Problem

Commodity contract negotiation is expensive and convoluted.

Commodity traders typically rely solely on messaging applications for the negotiation of contracts, leading to a highly secretive marketplace that relies on personal connections. This environment often prevents smaller companies from reaching favourable conditions. Additionally, facing rising regulatory requirements, these transactions are required to be more transparent and easily auditable. 

Discover

Why are companies unable to reach a larger audience?

The main issue companies encountered when trying to reach favourable terms in a contract is not being able to reach a large network. We were able to make multi-counterparty negotiations much easier for all companies by creating a single place where all communications and contractual terms can be managed.

Based on our discovery we were able to include provisions for creating the contract in the system and emailing counterparties, or completing the entire negotiation process with the counterparty logged in to the platform, across a variety of different trade methods.

Key Discovery Activities

User Interviews revealed that price discovery was a major issue for smaller companies who didn't have the resources to engage with a wide range of companies. This meant cargoes sold on the spot market were selling for less than a big company would be able to achieve.

User Persona helped us understand that commodities traders were highly secretive in their negotiations, which led to a shift in the way we designed the product.

Usability Testing revealed that users wanted workflows that were flexible and not linear, as contracts are often negotiated across a variety of medium and methods.

Competitive & Comparative Analysis helped us understand the current solutions on the market and why they were not solving the problems we identified.

Outcome

A platform for contract capture & price discovery.

I was tasked with creating a digital platform that would create stronger contract outcomes for companies big and small by enabling simultaneous negotation with multiple counterparties.

This meant creating a workflow that was both intuitive and flexible and covered trades ranging from bilateral and tender through to auctions.

NB: Bilateral trades are usually standard, flexible negotiations, while tender trades are similar to auctions but don't have the same urgency and intensity as an auction.

Key Feature

Encouraging competition for price.

Close collaboration with the development team led to a digital platform that could host hundreds of counterparties for simultaneous auctions. This led to the involvement of interested buyers who would previously have struggled to negotiate with sellers. When first going live in 2022 this system saw cargoes of lithium sell for almost 3x their expected value.

NB: Some elements of the UI have been altered to comply with NDA. Please contact me for more in-depth designs.

Key Feature

Making complex terms easy to compare.

Termsheets are at the heart of contract negotiation, and so we ensured they were not just easy to create but also to compare and audit. This meant critical time savings for time-poor traders and easy tracking for risk management teams.

NB: Some elements of the UI have been altered to comply with NDA. Please contact me for more in-depth designs.

Key Feature

Simplifying metrics for time-poor managers.

The trade timeline surfaces communications that were previously squirrelled away in email threads by providing a overview of the entire trade. This makes it much easier for traders and trading managers to understand the progress of a trade at a glance.

NB: Some elements of the UI have been altered to comply with NDA. Please contact me for more in-depth designs.

Learning

Problem finding before problem solving.

Sometimes the problem you set out to solve isn't the problem you need to solve.

GLX Connect started out as a very different platform that was entirely redesign during my time on the project. As the team invested more into UX research (among other research) we discovered that the issues we thought we were solving were not neccessarily valuable to key stakeholders - or rather, certain stakeholders benefitted from these problems existing. This meant a redesign of the project with privacy and permissions management at the forefront, among other significant changes.

Learning

Balancing performance and design.

As the lead designer on the project, I worked closely with the development team to ensure all designs were performant - particularly due to the system supporting hundreds of users in time-sensitive scenarios, often with millions on the line. Trial and error with internal performance testing meant several design iterations to keep the system performing smoothly under intensive use.

GLX CARGO

Product Design / UX Design / SaaS

Understanding and streamlining complex workflows with the world’s leading commodities companies.