Jan 21

Written by: Matt Abar
1/21/2009 9:44 AM

We're starting to get ready for an Alpha 2 release and several new features made the cut. We've spent a lot of time thinking about the FinFolio UI and the quality of our user experience. Techfi's Portfolio 2000 was a rigid piece of software, judged by normal software standards. I feel that, in it's day, for our industry, it was the best software around, but compared to something like the current Microsoft Office, it's clunky.

With P2K, you could filter your data, but not dynamically and only at certain points in the software. You could search for data, but only certain types of data and not everywhere at once. A couple screens presented information graphically but graphs weren't pervasive throughout the software and they didn't really show you anything you couldn't see just by looking at the data on the screen. All valid problems but with this post I'm going to focus on search.

One of the interesting things about Google is that people use it in lieu of bookmarks in their browser. When my parents go to their e-mail acccount they don't click on a browser bookmark or type "mail.yahoo.com" into the address bar. They go to Google and type "yahoo mail". Even if they misspell it, Google still puts Yahoo mail at the top of the results page. Search is now the primary way people navigate the Internet.

So how do you "Googlize" the search function in portfolio management software? We put a "Search FinFolio" box in the upper-right corner of the window, which is always visible. At any point, you can type a search term into the box, hit enter, and a list of search results appears in the main window. Double-click on any result and it takes you to the item you were searching for.

You can type anything into the box and it finds it. Ticker symbols, account numbers, partial client names, a phrase from your client notes--anything. You can group your results by data type (clients, portfolios, etc.) and relevance (a security with a matching ticker symbol appears before a client with the symbol mentioned in his client notes). Since search works across all data, searching on "apple" would list both "Apple Computer" and "Gweneth Paltrow", because you mentioned Gweneth's daughter "Apple" in the client notes.

It's still easy to view lists of the various data tables. A sortable, filterable client list is always one click away (more on that soon). But I anticipate the search box being the primary way users find data and navigate through FinFolio.

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