Hi Mia, John, thank you very much for pointing these out.  They've triggered quite a few viable design ideas.

The PNC, mint, filife interfaces are impressive and very un-banklike.  It's confirmed how far corporate & investment bank web services is lagging behind retail.

Do keep me posted on any other good interaction patterns from games, financial tools and I'll do the same.

Thanks again. I really appreciate the support.
Theba

--- In GameUIdesign@yahoogroups.com, "John Ferrara" <john_ferrara@...> wrote:
>
> Hmm.... I don't have an ideal example, but I can approach the
> question in a few ways.
>
> 1. This isn't so much a charting interface, but I'd recommend
> checking out PNC Bank's Virtual Wallet because it does incorporate
> game elements very effectively into a financial website. A demo is
> available at http://www.pncvirtualwallet.com. Select "Explore
> Virtual Wallet", then "See What's Inside". The orange circles at
> the top will navigate you through some amazing concepts; I'd
> recommend watching the videos for all of them.
>
> 2. Gapminder World has an incredibly robust charting interface that
> isn't very gamey, but does encourage play.
> http://graphs.gapminder.org/world. You can change the value of
> either axis, assign third and fourth values the size and color of
> each bubble, change the range of bubble sizes, change bubble
> opacity, change time period or run period as a movie, highlight
> specific countries, track any country's movement over time, change
> the whole view to a global map, and on and on. You can spend days
> playing with it.
>
> 3. Applications like the Simpsons avatar creator apply very gamelike
> aesthetics and spirit to something that isn't a game at all. At
> some level these are more enjoyable to use because there's a
> lightness to the interface that makes it feel fun in and of itself.
> Go to simpsonsmovie.com, click "Enter Site", then wait for "Creat
> your own Simpsons Avatar" to appear at the top of the screen.
>
> 4. Some games can have fairly robust displays for quantitative
> information with interesting interfaces, often rendered in
> unconventional and highly visual ways. I'd recommend Sim City,
> Civilization IV, World of Warcraft, Sins of a Solar Empire, and
> Final Fantasy XII for inspiration.
>
>
> Anyone else have any examples?
>
> John
>
>
> --- In GameUIdesign@yahoogroups.com, "Theba Islam" theba.islam@
> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Hi John, looking forward to hearing more about the discussion.
> >
> > Was wondering if you or anyone could help me with this –
> > I'm redesigning an extremely dated charting application used by our
> > Rates Traders.
> > Though dated and clunky the functionality is very sophisticated,
> > allowing them to do volatility & correlation analysis and risk
> > modelling.
> >
> > The goal is to make the application more playful, game like, in
> allowing
> > Traders to pick and choose from the 1000s of instruments and
> markets,
> > customise historic volatility calculations, drag and drop formulas
> into
> > series/weight combinations and redraw charts.
> >
> > Have you come across anything similar in Banks or even games that
> could
> > help?
> >
> > Many thanks in advance,
> > Theba
> >
>