Trading Platform Design No-Nos: What People Get Wrong in UX/UI Design

As part of our ongoing commitment to our clients, here at Devexperts, we like to routinely share some of the valuable insights we’ve gained over the years by working with a large variety of fintech firms.

From hungry and agile startups to world-beating household names, Devexperts has spent thousands upon thousands of hours providing our customers with the best development experience and the most polished finished products. 

In this series of articles, we want to share some of these insights, as well as a little of the secret sauce that we feel separates the most successful trading firms from the rest of the pack.  

In this article, we want to focus on UX/UI design in trading apps. This is a subject we’ve had to get quite deep in the weeds on, especially considering the experience we’ve amassed in the development of a number of highly successful proprietary trading platforms for our clients, as well as our own in-house DXtrade solution, which has gone from strength to strength in recent years.  

The aim is to get you thinking about the experience your existing user interfaces offer your customers, as well as how these can be improved to make your services more attractive, quick to convert, and sticky once the client is there. 

Too many steps

Conversion is a numbers game. You cast a wide net to attract as many interested visitors as possible to your various offerings. But a big part of this numbers game is thinking very carefully about how prospective clients drop off at every step on the way to becoming full-fledged clients with funded trading accounts. 

In our view, your trading app is the flagship of your business. It’s the place where your clients will spend the most time, and it’s also the place where the lion’s share of your revenues will be generated.

For these reasons, it’s imperative that if you have a trading platform that you’re proud of, you want prospective traders to get their hands on it as soon as possible and to be able to experience for themselves what trading with your firm will be like. 

It doesn’t matter how successful your marketing funnel is at bringing prospects to your content, every obstacle you place in the way of them being able to browse and experiment with your platform, every onerous step they have to take before finally being given access to your trading app, is yet another opportunity for them to navigate away.

This is becoming all the more relevant as competition in the industry continues to increase, all while attention spans continue to diminish.  

So, we recommend you audit the steps currently required to access this jewel in the crown of your trading services and attempt to cut them in half. 

Too busy

This is perhaps a throwback to when online trading wasn’t the mainstream lifestyle product it has evolved into today. In the industry’s early days, a premium was placed on making trading platforms look as complicated and “professional” as possible.

We’re all familiar with the overly busy assortments of windows, tabs, sidebars, and menu options designed to make trading platforms look like they can successfully land a Mars rover while also executing trades with minimal slippage.  

If you need any convincing that this is probably not the approach you should be going for today, consider the fact that not only have the demographics you’re trying to appeal to completely changed, but so too have their devices and, more importantly, the sizes of the screens they’re using to access your services.  

This is why some of the biggest names in online trading have been migrating to a much more user-friendly approach where simplicity is key but also where advanced features and the full power of your platform can be accessible at the tap of an icon when a client wants to experience all the possibilities.  

Keep in mind that a large percentage of incoming prospects may be new to trading or may have never placed a trade in their lives. The most successful players in the industry manage to strike a balance between simplicity at first glance while having the option to easily switch to a “full” version of what they offer.

This goes back to the drop-offs we discussed in the previous point. Overwhelming newcomers with complexity is almost guaranteed to lead to a percentage of these newcomers deciding they may not be ready to sign up for your services. 

Too samey

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?

This seems to have been the governing design principle in trading platform design for the better part of twenty years. But again, consider that you’re dealing with new generations of traders who are native smartphone users and have grown accustomed to interacting with highly efficient, very well-designed user interfaces in all the other apps they frequently use.

You don’t want your app to offer the clunkiest experience on your client’s home screen.  

For this reason, copy-pasting the layouts of trading platforms of old and optimizing them for mobile use may have been enough when the industry was making its transition from desktop to mobile, but nowadays, it may be lacking.  

Of course, we’re not recommending that you reinvent the wheel in this instance. Trading platforms have evolved over the years to take a form that traders recognize and find most efficient for charting and trading purposes.

What we recommend is that you account for how most of your users currently interact with your trading platforms and use this behavioral data to rethink the workflow of your trading apps. This will also make your apps stand out in a sea of cookie-cutter platforms while also allowing you to tailor the experience to what’s most important for your business. 

Are you big on trading competitions or social trading? Have you made the leap to experimenting with AI trading assistants? Are your customers diehard chartists, or are they more likely to buy or sell at the market without needing to draw lines all over the place? These details can be incorporated to really tailor the first impressions your platforms provide to first-time users, as well as gently steer them in a direction that the business has concluded is optimal.  

Too much useless data

As you may be able to tell, we’re of the opinion that sometimes less is more. Especially when you only have a few moments to grab someone’s attention and get them to imagine what trading with your company might be like.  

Too often we find that trading firms like to cram every bit of data they may have to offer into the platform, which can be overwhelming for newcomers, especially at first glance. This can lead to a user interface that is cluttered with inboxes that traders hardly ever open, news feeds that provide little added value, and trading stats and heatmaps that do more to confuse rather than to entice.  

We understand that you have your third-party subscriptions that you want to make the most of, as well as your existing client communication strategies, and that you may also want to offer your own in-house trading data to your clients in an engaging manner, but sometimes less really is more.

If your newsfeed is of a poorer quality than your client’s own curated feed on their social media, then why is it taking up space?

These can all be valuable additions if designed correctly and incorporated into your platform’s other myriad features in a useful way, but simply hitting your clients with every bit of data you’ve got at your disposal can often have the opposite of the desired effect. Paralysis by analysis is a real thing and can have a truly detrimental effect on a client’s ability to pull the trigger.

So, keep it simple, keep it clean, and ensure that every bit of data you offer your clients is part of an overall trading workflow that supplements their primary activity rather than offering a distraction from it.  

Next time…

We hope that you’ve enjoyed this article and that it has given you some things to take stock of and think about.

If you’d like to discuss any of the issues raised above or see how we can improve the user experience you’re currently offering your clients, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

In our next installment, we’ll switch gears and get into some of the trends and best practices currently employed by some of the business’s biggest and most successful trading names. Stay posted!