Baltic Exchange Designing a Real Time Market Dashboard for Underwriters & Staff

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The Baltic Exchange operates in one of the fastest-moving global industries, maritime trade and freight market pricing, where speed, accuracy, and accessibility of information are crucial. Their underwriters and staff required a real-time dashboard that could be used daily, providing instant access to live market data, freight indices, and key insights without unnecessary distractions.

Given the high-stakes, fast-paced nature of the industry, the dashboard needed to be highly responsive, adaptable, and intuitive, ensuring users could make quick, informed decisions. The ability to customise and personalise their interface was a key requirement, allowing users to filter and prioritise the information they needed without resetting preferences each time they logged in.

Before even winning the project, I took the initiative to study the freight and maritime market, learning about its complexities to ensure I could speak confidently with stakeholders. This early research proved invaluable when discussing API integrations, data visualisation, and real-time market fluctuations, helping us craft a product that directly addressed the needs of Baltic Exchange users.

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My Approach

To deliver a highly flexible and scalable dashboard, we focused on:

• Component-based design, allowing users to move elements around like a Lego block system to create a personalised interface.
• Real-time data visualisation, ensuring that fluctuating market prices were displayed dynamically without delays.
• Multi-device accessibility, particularly on mobile, since many existing market tools lacked mobile support, a key concern raised by stakeholders.
• A dual-experience platform, where:
• Before login, the site communicated the brand’s credibility and market expertise to external visitors.
• After login, users entered a distraction-free, data-driven environment, showing only relevant information tailored to their needs.

Given the nature of this dashboard, speed and efficiency were critical, meaning we worked closely with backend teams to ensure API calls were optimised for quick data retrieval and display. The system had to handle high volumes of data transactions without compromising performance, especially as market prices fluctuated.

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What I was tasked to do

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The Result

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The final Baltic Exchange dashboard provided underwriters and staff with a seamless, high-speed, and personalised experience, significantly improving data accessibility, user efficiency, and mobile usability. The modular, flexible UI empowered users to customise their workspace, ensuring they saw the most relevant data at any given time.

By integrating real-time market updates, personalised filters, and multi-device access, the platform positioned the Baltic Exchange as a forward-thinking, tech-savvy leader in the maritime trade space.

This project was an invaluable learning experience in high-frequency API integration, rapid turnaround design, and strategic UX problem-solving, reinforcing the importance of speed, accuracy, and adaptability in digital product design for financial and trade markets.

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