In the fall of 2003, Merrill’s Global Private Client and Global Technology and Services groups and Thomson Financial collaborated on one of the biggest outsourcing initiatives designed to improve the efficiency of Merrill’s financial advisors. I was hired as a contractor under Thomson Financial to help create this product alongside multiple sub-contracted companies.
My responsibilities:
- Created global UI components and templates such as navigation, breadcrumbs, buttons, footers
- write common XSL functions for date-formatting, account string manipulation, pagination, security navigation, and error validation..
- author of front end coding standards document
- helped perform technical interviews for UI consultants.
- ensure all global components worked with the limitations of browsers
- maintain wireframes
- Helped project meet performance SLAs by providing ideas and front-end optimizations
Screenshots
Merrill Lynch Online was a collection of Market Data, Accounts and Trading components suited for brokers.
Front-End Coding Standards
The purpose of the Front-End Coding Standards document was to ensure code consistency across the project. Every UI developer had to use the same naming convensions, formatting, document type and version numbers. We used the 1.0 release of XSL and XPATH. JavaScript version 1.2 implemented some different capabilities regarding equality tests when the operands were different types. All levels of client-side code was speced out to ensure greatest compatibility between browsers and make code reviews easier. Here are a couple of pages of that document.
HTML Templates
White Labeling
Merrill dropped the project right after it was completed sometime in 2005. As a result Thomson tried to re-brand the remaining work in order to pitch other clients. I applied new CSS and XSL to create different looks.
Web TV
One of the unique requirements of the project was to fully support MSNTV. MSN TV (formerly WebTV) was a set-top box used to browse web pages on your television. I had to help write compatible javascript and markup for this device. Here is a comparison of the top navigation menu.
Additional Screenshots
