Seamless Trading Anywhere:
Crafting a Mobile-Friendly Trading Experience
ACY Securities app is a trading and investment platform designed to offer users advanced tools for CFDs trading, market analysis, and portfolio management. It’s ideal for both beginners and experienced investors looking to make informed decisions.
How might we design a mobile-friendly trading app that simplifies the trading experience for both beginners and experts?
My Role
I was assigned as the sole designer for this project.
I handled the design process from user flows to wireframes, prototypes, and QA.
I also created the UI and established design systems.
I collaborated closely with product managers, developers, QA engineers, and compliance officers.
Why Prioritize Mobile Over Web?
ACY Securities was founded in 2013 with a range of web-based platforms. As our business grew rapidly, we noticed that many of our customers were accessing our websites on their phones. Starting in 2022, we began receiving significant customer feedback indicating that our web-based platforms were complex and inefficient to use.
web-based platforms (Before)
80% of our leads came from sales contacting them via phone calls, requiring significant manual effort. Our business relied more on marketing than on product-led growth.
As a result, our sales didn’t grow as quickly as expected.
In addition, existing customers expressed a strong desire for a mobile app that would allow them to trade and manage their funds anytime, anywhere.
Business Goals
Before starting this project, I spoke with our stakeholders to understand our business goals. As a fintech designer, I have to consider business goals to ensure my designs not only enhance user experience but also drive revenue and support business growth.
Expand Market Reach
Attract newbies and experts alike, build a trading platform that suits everyone. Remove the barriers to entry and make investing easy.
Increase Trading Volume
Facility quick and easy execution of trades, implement advanced tools to encourage timely decision-making and increase trading frequency.
Build brand loyalty and trust
Engage customers directly and instantly, retain customers and foster long-term relationships.
Aligning Vision and Strategy
Identifying Market Gaps: Integrating Trading Functionality
Initially, stakeholders aimed to focus only on fund and account management for the app, reflecting our web-based platforms where trading, account, and fund management were separated. However, my market analysis revealed that competitors had integrated these features into a single app, creating a seamless user experience. So I proposed adding trading functionality to align with market trends and enhance our competitiveness—a recommendation that was approved.
Optimizing Without Overhauling Architecture
With a tight 6-month launch deadline, I worked closely with backend and system architecture teams to address the technical complexities of integrating trading features. Recognizing that trading apps depend heavily on accurate and stable backend systems, we faced a critical decision: rather than building a new system architecture—which would have been infeasible within the timeframe—we opted to retain the existing architecture to save time. Updates were made only when absolutely necessary to ensure compatibility and functionality.
Focusing on Usability and Integration
Within these constraints, I prioritized enhancing the user experience by addressing usability issues, creating new user flows to accommodate the integrated trading features, and simplifying existing workflows. I ensured the seamless integration of trading, fund, and account management features, delivering a cohesive and efficient app experience.
I initiated interviews with 15 users to understand what they value and what confuses them on our existing platforms. I also facilitated 5 internal interviews with customer service and sales teams to gather client feedback from their interactions. To complement these findings, I conducted extensive competitor analysis to identify industry best practices and uncover opportunities for differentiation. Additionally, I analyzed user behavior through mouse tracking and heatmap data, ensuring our design decisions were grounded in both qualitative and quantitative insights.
Findings from User Research
I grouped all the user feedback into 3 themes.
Fund Management
Complicated withdrawal process and long waiting times to verify bank information.
Failed money deposit and withdrawals with no reasons given.
Unclear instructions for money transfers, and no timely notifications regarding the money process.
Long lists of payment methods that confuse users and uncleared verification processes.
Users can’t view balance, equity, and margin information at a glance.
Trading
Novice traders feel overwhelmed with complex trading terms, order types and advanced tools.
Struggles with unclear fee calculations and information when placing orders.
Requires switching between different apps to gather information for making trading decisions.
Professional traders find it hard to locate the needed tools from the cluttered interface.
Professional traders need more quick execution tools.
Accounts Management
Inefficient opening account process, difficult to finish ID check.
Confused to choose and switch accounts.
Missed important information among various notifications and emails.
Integrating Platforms
Our stakeholders selected key features that needed to be included in the first version of the app. I began by organising the information architecture (IA) of those features from the old design.
The main purpose of this step was to help clarify what we have, what needs to be integrated, and what needs to be deleted, ultimately generating a new IA for the app design.
By analysing the IA, I discovered that many features were repeated but differed slightly, particularly in the fund management section. This issue forces users to frequently switch between web platforms to make trading decisions. Additionally, the login processes for the two platforms were not unified, requiring users to use different usernames to access each platform.
Previous Information Architecture
New Information Architecture
Based on this analysis, I grouped the features into 7 categories and organised them into 4 tabs in the app: Home, Trade, Portfolio, and Profile. Account management was mainly integrated into the Profile tab, and fund management was made accessible across the app for quick access. After consulting with our architecture engineers, we agreed to unify and streamline the login and sign-up methods.
For me, the biggest challenge is that I am also a beginner in trading, and my knowledge of it is quite limited. The advantage of this is that I can better consider the user experience from a beginner's perspective.
However, to create a good design, I need to learn more about trading and become an experienced trader. But by doing so, I might overlook the needs of beginners, which contradicts the goal of removing barriers to entry.
In the end, I realized that my own learning journey should be the key reference for my design. I need to identify the most straightforward trading concepts and incorporate them into the design.
New Design
I replaced the 'Market Order' with a simple 'Buy + unit + current price' button. The 'Limit Order' and 'Stop Order' were merged and explained using 'Buy when price is,' eliminating the need for users to differentiate between the two. 'Stop Loss' and 'Take Profit' are grouped together and listed separately as additional settings.
The trading settings are arranged vertically in a toggle format, guiding users to think through each step sequentially.
