Fastmarkets
For over 130 years Fastmarkets has provided world leading specialist commodity expertise, news and pricing
Lead Designer
ROLE
18 Months
DURATION
Native & Web
PLATFORMS
BACKGROUND & PROBLEM
Fastmarkets is a global provider of commodity price data and market intelligence, serving professionals across metals, mining, agriculture, energy, and forest products.
Following a period of growth driven by acquisitions, the business inherited a complex ecosystem of specialist pricing and news tools.
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Fragmented Platforms
Pricing, news, and analysis were spread across multiple products, forcing users to switch products to complete tasks.
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Product & Pricing Fragmentation
Fragmented products made it hard to package, price, and communicate the value of Fastmarkets as a unified offering.
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Inconsistent Experiences
Different UX patterns and poor cross-device continuity increased cognitive load and broke role-based workflows.
The goal was to bring Fastmarkets' fragmented products together under a single platform, create a consistent cross-device experience for expert users, and unlock clearer packaging and pricing of its data and insight offerings — while protecting revenue-critical workflows.
PRODUCT STAKEHOLDER DISCOVERY WORKSHOPS
Discovery & Understanding User Needs
Fastmarkets serves specialist users operating in highly regulated, time-sensitive markets. With limited access to direct research participants, discovery focused on triangulating insight from stakeholder workshops, interviews with account and sales teams, and behavioural usage analytics to understand real customer workflows and constraints.
Discovery revealed two foundational requirements:
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Customisable Experiences Were Essential
Users ranged from multi-screen desktop day traders to mobile-only scrap dealers, making a flexible, customisable interface a core requirement.
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Global by Default
Users tracked different commodities across regions, making localisation essential across language, currency, and market conventions.
These findings shaped the platform's modular workspace model, cross-device strategy, and approach to localisation from the outset.
WHAT DID WE RELEASE?
We released a unified Fastmarkets platform that replaced a fragmented set of pricing and news products with a single, flexible experience.
At its core was a modular workspace model, enabling users to tailor dashboards around their commodities, regions, and priorities. Supporting both desktop-heavy analysis and mobile-first monitoring.
The platform was designed global by default, with built-in support for multiple currencies, languages, and regional market conventions, allowing users to move seamlessly across devices without losing context.
LAUNCH & OUTCOMES
The redesigned experience built on Fastmarkets' 2020 launch of a unified client platform, evolving it into a more flexible and configurable product aligned to real customer workflows.
The platform was rolled out incrementally to minimise risk and avoid disruption to revenue-critical users. Customers responded positively to the clarity and flexibility of the experience, particularly the ability to tailor workspaces around specific commodities, regions, and priorities.
Internally, the unified platform simplified product packaging and established a scalable foundation for clearer positioning, faster iteration, and a more cohesive global offering.
Impact
- ↓ 19% customer support contacts
- ↑ 30% subscription revenue
- ↑ 97% service uptime
REFLECTIONS ON SCALE & CUSTOMISATION
Designing for scale surfaced two challenges: rationalising a complex catalogue of commodities without overwhelming users, and enabling flexible, customisable workspaces without introducing instability. Both required clear system rules, careful trade-offs, and close collaboration with engineering.
Will Loveland
EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND
4°C