XP Investimentos · 2021–2022
Boletador
3 min → 30 s
and 80%+ of active brokers
Order entry rebuilt around the keyboard, for brokers on the desk
The problem
I was the only designer on this product. The users were XP's own brokers on the desk: not advisors in the field, but people sitting with several windows open, entering orders in volume all day. A single order took three minutes on the standard system. The time came from three places: the number of fields, hunting for information somewhere else, and waiting on the system. The root cause was not the interface. The previous version came from an external vendor and could not reach XP's internal data, so brokers typed in by hand information the company already had. No redesign of that system would have fixed it. It was a question of who owned the data.
What I ruled out
Several information layouts were tested before the final one. A single larger screen was discarded: brokers needed that screen space for other things, and an order ticket has no business taking over the monitor of someone working across many windows. Step by step was discarded too. The hardest one to drop was the layout that mirrored the order of the old system. It was familiar, but it was bad for them and it produced wrong entries. Keeping the muscle memory would have preserved the error along with it. Breaking with the familiar forces relearning, and that is an uncomfortable call to defend, but the familiar was the source of the mistake.
The decision
Boundary of authorship first: the decision to internalize the systems had already been made by the company. Everything was being brought in house, and the redesign travelled with it. My contribution was what to do with the opening, not the choice to open it. What I did with it: navigation driven by Tab, because a desk professional does not take their hands off the keyboard, and a set of fields fed directly from XP's own internal data, precisely what the external vendor could not do. Same question I had asked in the field at Itaú, where are the user's hands, with the opposite answer: voice out there, keyboard here.
The result
Order entry went from three minutes to thirty seconds, and the platform reached more than 80% of active brokers. The gain is not one clever screen; it is the removal of the lookups that the old vendor system forced, plus a field order that no longer invited the wrong entry, plus a form the broker can move through with Tab instead of reaching for the mouse.
What I'd do differently
Two things. A dark mode version from the start, rather than as something to be added later. And fewer fields still: fill in only what is indispensable, land on a confirmation screen, and offer an edit for whatever is wrong there. That inverts the logic of the form: instead of filling everything in and then checking it, you fill in the minimum and correct the exception.