IMS Streaming News

Financial professionals live inside their market terminals, where a few seconds of latency on a headline can move a decision. IMS Streaming News is the real-time news module inside Dow Jones' OpenFin IMS workspace - a continuous, scannable stream of market-moving headlines embedded directly in the trader's desktop environment. I led the UX architecture and design for version 2.0.

Overview

Streaming News lives as a module in the Dow Jones OpenFin workspace alongside Portfolio, Top News, Barron's, WSJ, and alerts. The 2.0 work reframed it from a simple ticker into a focused real-time reading surface, with entity-aware headlines, personalisation, and settings tuned for professionals who keep it open all day. As UX Architect I owned the information architecture, the interaction model, and the high-fidelity design.

The challenge

A streaming feed has to do two opposing things at once: never stop moving, yet never overwhelm. For a professional watching it in their peripheral vision all day, density, scan-ability, and the ability to act on a headline without leaving the stream are everything.

• Keep a continuous real-time stream readable, not noisy, at a glance
• Let a market-moving headline connect to the company and price it concerns, in place
• Fit a dense terminal context (OpenFin) without breaking the trader's workflow
• Give power users control over language, time, format, and what they follow

The detailed walkthrough continues behind the gate - the information architecture, the entity-aware feed, the settings model, and the process.

Information architecture

I mapped the full structure first: how Streaming News sits within the OpenFin workspace, the header with global settings, user profile, preferences and help, the real-time headline stream, and every form, state, and save/cancel path. The flow is the contract that kept design and engineering aligned across a dense, stateful module.

Entity-aware headlines

The differentiator is that headlines are connected to the entities they mention. Hovering a company surfaces its live quote - price, change, and context - inline, so a professional can read a headline and see what it means for the instrument without leaving the stream.

Personalisation and settings

Because professionals keep the module open all day, control matters. Global settings cover interface and streaming-news language, time zone, time format, and timestamp precision, while the profile carries identity, role, and preferences - all with deliberate default, save, and cancel behavior so nothing changes by accident.

Process

The work moved from an audit of the existing module and a prioritised feature set, through user flows and wireframes, into the high-fidelity OpenFin-ready design, validated against the realities of the trader's desktop.

Outcome

• A real-time streaming module that stays readable and scannable all day
• Entity-aware headlines that connect market news to instruments in place
• A personalisation and settings model tuned for always-on professional use
• An OpenFin-ready experience embedded in the trader's desktop workflow

A streaming feed is a trust instrument - it has to move constantly without ever becoming noise, and let a professional act on a headline the moment they read it.