Trading Platform UX/UI: Overhaul Your Design with the Latest Trends
Welcome back to our two-part exploration of UX and UI design best practices for online trading platforms. Last time, we honed in on some design no-nos that are sure to cause registration drop-offs (too many steps), confuse and alienate new traders (too busy, too much useless data), and also fail to make your trading business stand out in an already highly competitive market (too samey).
This time, we’d like to focus on some contemporary trends and design best practices that are proven remedies to the above issues. Like in the previous article, we’ll take these issues one by one and explore what you can do to solve them and transform your business into a financial services powerhouse.
Too many steps? Solution: All-in-one platforms
Registration drop-offs occur when prospective traders must go through too many steps before registering an account and getting to experience your wares. The more hoops you force a new registration to jump through, the higher the probability they’ll click away before ever completing the process.
Online trading businesses across the asset landscape are recognizing that the best way to avoid these drop-offs is to make their trading platform an all-in-one interface through which clients can perform all actions relevant to the business, from sign-up through account verification and funding to trading and account management. As mentioned in the previous article, your platform is the flagship of your business; it’s where your clients will spend most of their time, and it’s also what new registrations want to get their hands on as soon as possible.
To this end, your marketing funnels should direct prospective traders to your platform, where they ought to be able to quickly register an account, peruse the platform and what you have on offer, as well as complete their account verification and funding of their account, all in one place.
This platform-centric approach has been a game-changer for many financial services businesses. It contributes to a much easier and more pleasant experience for clients while also allowing businesses to consolidate all the important data collection and monitoring, which is so crucial nowadays, to one centralized platform.
The industry-wide move towards mobile interfaces has been a great helping hand in this regard, as the logic of mobile applications is more geared to having the app itself be the main point of contact with the customer rather than there being a divide between web real estate and downloadable trading software, as was the norm for previous generations of traders.
Too busy? Solution: Lite mode/Pro mode
One of the perennial problems for online trading businesses is that trading is actually quite an involved affair, which makes it difficult to appeal to a wider population of prospective traders. As trading has moved into the mainstream and become a lifestyle product, trading businesses have had to increasingly appeal to two very different groups of traders: beginners and experienced operators. The overly complex platform layouts that seasoned traders expect are precisely what newcomers to the world of trading find the most daunting.
One of the most effective solutions to this problem was pioneered by the crypto-trading world. As a new asset class with an assortment of novel challenges (owing to the uniqueness of crypto as an instrument), businesses in this space had to build their infrastructures from the ground up. They evolved quite different solutions to traditional FX or equities businesses.
Many crypto businesses have learned to ease new traders in, and one of the best ways to do this has been to hide advanced features behind a simple Lite Mode/Pro Mode toggle, offering a much more streamlined interface for newcomers while allowing experienced traders to get to all the advanced features in just one step. It’s an extremely simple but incredibly effective solution that can be accomplished by creating two separate platform layouts and allowing clients to easily switch between them.
Too samey? Solution: Optimize with user data
The look and feel of trading platforms haven’t evolved all that much in recent years, largely because of a logic of not wishing to reinvent the wheel or fix something that isn’t broken. For this reason, when trading businesses have an opportunity to make changes (for example, when overhauling their client-facing interfaces), they tend to play it safe.
Our suggestion, when attempting to get clients to rethink how their platforms work, is to remind them that they now have access to a trove of user behavior data, which can be invaluable when making modest but useful changes to their platform design.
Observing how users navigate your existing platform (where they spend most of their time, what unnecessary steps the existing layout forces them to make, what value-added data or indicators they interact with the most, etc.) can be a highly useful exercise. It can provide insights that can form the initial inspiration behind successful UX/UI design choices. These data are also invaluable when designing one-size-fits-all default layouts for different cohorts of clients.
Another thing to keep in mind is that while there has been a broadscale switch to mobile, this doesn’t mean that your interfaces should be optimized for mobile alone. Nowadays, your users will access your platforms via smartphones but also laptops and tablets, as well as a new generation of tablet/laptop hybrids (e.g. Chromebook/Surface), all with slightly different UX considerations. Traders spend a great deal of time fiddling with their charts, so you must ensure that it’s an intuitive and responsive experience for them.
Too much useless data? Solution: Lead with your strengths & listen to your people
Too often, businesses try to be all things to all people and can end up looking like a poor amalgamation of all their competitors. Obviously, in an era where trading is evolving into a mass-market product, you want access to this enlarged pool of potential traders. But the best way to stand out, in our opinion, is to lead with your strengths.
What area of the asset landscape do most of your clients come to you for? We understand that the larger multi-asset market is what every trading business wants to aim for, but usually, there’s an asset class (or sometimes even a single instrument) that the lion’s share of a trading business’s clients are interested in.
If this is the case, then not only does your business have the most knowledge and experience regarding this area of the asset universe, but so, too, do your team members. In combination with the insights brought in from the observation of user behavior, the asset-specific expertise of the business as a whole can be leveraged to make intelligent choices when it comes to the kind of data your clients value the most, how it is presented to them, and where to source it from.
For example, for traders of equities, some kind of user-defined stock screening functionality is probably far more useful than a generic heatmap and newsfeed. Likewise, FX traders value correlation data regarding the currencies they trade over some of the more conventional data choices that brokers have on offer. It’s all about knowing the subtle differences between trading workflows across the asset landscape and tailoring your data provision to these subtleties.
As another example, in the early days of cryptocurrency trading, crypto exchanges recognized that the ability of users to chat between themselves (as in the infamous “troll box”) was a far more useful addition to their rudimentary trading interfaces than any other kind of data presentation. Crypto trading was a largely socially driven phenomenon, so it benefited these businesses to have users spread ideas, resources, and even knowledge between themselves rather than trying to guide the process in any concerted way. This proved to be a very effective solution and perhaps one of the stickiest UX/UI development decisions made by any trading business. Of course, such a design choice won’t work for everyone, but it should get you thinking about how to tailor the information you make available on your platform to the assets that are most important to you in an effort to keep your traders engaged.
In conclusion
We hope that the solutions and examples presented in this pair of articles have given you some ideas regarding utilizing the resources available (data & human expertise) when thinking about how to tailor the look and feel of your platform. Successful UX/UI design choices that start life off in the above manner eventually allow you to serve your clients better and help you stand out in a crowded market of cookie-cutter trading platforms.
For further discussion of any of the ideas presented in these articles, please get in touch, and as always, stay posted for more articles such as these on a variety of topics pertinent to your business goals.