Case Study · Fintech
India's first digital B2B bond trading platform — streamlining trading for institutions, wealth firms, and brokers through a unified marketplace.
Problem & Context
The impact: Market watch, order book, execution, and settlement lived apart. Slow handoffs meant missed prices and more middlemen.
The bet: Put the highest-frequency trading actions in one place so institutions, wealth firms, and brokers could work without constant switching — and Harmoney could earn a daily seat at the desk.
Step 02 / What I Did
Scope covered end-to-end UX from discovery through launch: offline trading workflow mapping, product structure, key screens for web and mobile, and translation of complex trading logic into clear interactions.
The design foundation was built from scratch — tokens, reusable components, and handoff specs — with ongoing alignment alongside the CEO, CTO, and engineers on scope decisions, usability feedback, and release QA.
Team & Timeline
Team Structure
Leadership: CEO (domain strategy) + CTO (platform architecture)
Design: Kaushik — Founding Product Designer
Engineering: Frontend + backend team for trading workflows and infrastructure
Story
Harmoney started as a bond listing site; the product goal was a single trading environment where discovery, comparison, order placement, and execution tracking share one workflow — replacing the four-to-six-screen setup traders used daily.
At launch, Harmoney functioned as a bond-search site while trading still ran offline through calls and manual follow-ups. The target state was one connected workflow: discover bonds, compare options, place orders, and track execution without leaving the platform.
The Problem
Brokers negotiated verbally, hung up, and typed the deal into a spreadsheet. If a price changed while they were on another call, there was no way to know. Wealth managers often couldn’t even see which bonds were available.
The CEO came from bond trading and knew this could be digitized. The design challenge was different from most consumer products: institutional traders optimize for speed and dense data, not visual polish.
User Research
An active trader emphasized a unified platform for bond data, quick pricing, avoiding missed profitable quotes, and the relationship between faster trades and commission. They highlighted the benefit of minimizing intermediaries.
An institutional investor stressed efficient data consolidation, fast deal closure, quick pricing, and capturing transparent profitable quotes. They emphasized reducing intermediaries and speeding up processes.
Final Design
The final design balances information density with usability — desktop optimized for institutional traders, mobile for quick checks and on-the-go trading.
Outcomes
Monthly traded volume grew roughly 6× over the first year after the redesigned order-matching and closure flows shipped — a figure leadership cited in internal reviews and that I observed through successive user-testing cycles alongside product, not a metric I owned or measured in isolation.
Directional outcome the design enabled; exact attribution sits with product and business leadership.
Reflections
As the sole designer at an early-stage startup, there was no design manager or design ops function to lean on — every decision had to hold up on its own.
01 · Learn the domain first
Design decisions stayed guesses until bond trading mechanics were understood — not a surface read, but the actual workflows the CEO was building around. Domain fluency, not visual polish, made the interaction design defensible.
02 · Systems outlast screens
No single designer can specify every state of every component by hand. Building a reusable system — tokens, components, patterns — let engineering extrapolate correctly to states not personally drawn.
03 · Ship, then correct with real usage
Harmoney launched with a deliberately scoped first version, then improved based on how real traders actually used it. That feedback loop produced a better product faster than holding the release for a more complete design would have.
Confidentiality note: This project is under NDA. Design is complete and moving into development.
Interface redrawn and figures synthesized for case study presentation.
The core architectural logic and UX constraints remain true to production.