Crypto

Trading System Design

Intro

The popularity of cryptocurrency in the financial market has driven the need for a user-friendly, efficient, and regulation-compliant trading solution for crypto traders.

With a focus on combining the principles of stock trading and the specificities of crypto trading, the design of our system reflects the familiar logic of stock trading while simplifying the process to keep pace with the always-open crypto market. Our aim is to make cryptocurrency trading as effortless as online shopping.

Develop a trading system that caters people with different trading experience
Establish trust and confidence through well-thought-out service
Create a loyal customer base
Use technology to simplify processes while adhering regulation requirements.

Project Goals

All Projects

Service Design, UX Design, UI Design

Crypto

Our Goals

Develop a trading system that caters people with different trading experience

Establish trust and confidence through well-thought-out service

Create a loyal customer base

Use technology to simplify processes while adhering to regulatory requirements.

As a relatively new alternative investment, cryptocurrency trading provides a blank canvas for us to be creative about our service design in many ways. Since our goal is to bring the online shopping-like experience into investing, we decided to build our trading system that's not only friendly to people who are new to cryptocurrency but also provides room to grow for the veterans.

User Research

Market Research Analysis

Customer Interviews

Persona

User Journey Map

We compacted our insights into a few key areas and created a set of materials to summarize our findings. Which then severed as the foundation as we proceed forward into the ideation stage.

Building trust and confidence in investing

Giving hard-earned money to "jack-from-the-internet" for an "investment" might not be a good idea. Cryptocurrency is a relatively new investment alternative that still has a long way to earn the trust of the general public. System interactions need to be designed in a confidence-inspiring way to improve credibility to investors.

Accommodate customer's varying crypto background

As a "to C" product, the audience is targeted to the general public, and the varying knowledge in cryptocurrency of the user base could affect their user experience with the product.

Competitive market around the world

Living in an era of innovation, the speed of technology development is rising exponentially. Making the product excels among the competition is the key to staying attractive and relevant to the customer.

Challenges

In 2018, the cryptocurrency market reached its peak, valued at over $ 800 Billion. With more investors started to looking into trading cryptocurrency, we narrowed our focus on addressing key pain points existed in the industry.

Market Trading Page

Market trade serves as an essential form of trading service on our platform. It provides a wide range of information and flexibility for users who look for a versatile tool to meet their trading needs.

In designing the market trading page, we focused on reconstructing the information architecture based on the traditional market trading experience in the stock market. By decluttering the information we present to the user, redesigning information hierarchy with affordance in mind, we aim to provide the user with abundant information to help them make the right action, and with just enough data to act quickly.

Users who wish to trade through OTC service are required to identify themselves under the Know-Your-Client (KYC) policy, only users who passed KYC verification and met OTC requirements will be able to request quotes. This protects all parties involved in a transaction and the integrity of our anti-money laundering policy.

Quotes obtained from the network will refresh after a certain time period, this ensures the quote reflects the latest market status. Meanwhile, the interface displays a count-down timer that helps the user to keep track of quote validity.

Once a quote is accepted, the progress of order execution is displayed in the trade history section, to provide realtime feedback that keeps users informed about what is going on.

OTC Trade Service Design

Automated Over-The-Counter (OTC) trading is a unique service that we designed to provide volume, expedite trades for experienced investors and institutional clients.

Traditionally, OTC trades are handled by human agents with limitations. Although it has proven to work well in trading securities, the nature of cryptocurrency markets that runs 24/7 brings new challenges to the fintech industry.

Together with our partners, our OTC service provides a combination of an efficient broker-dealer network and escrow transactions. Our service acts as a neutral party to settle a trade brought forward by a buyer/seller mandate. In the trading aspect, we act as the agent to negotiate a trade between two parties and conducts settlement.

Our goals for the OTC service as follows:

Automated quote & trade service without the constraint of business hours.

Quotation requests are sent to multiple parties to match the most competitive price for its volume.

The client can take advantage of a wide variety of funding/withdrawing methods available on our platform for escrowed trades.

The system handles transaction histories and legal documents electronically for compliance requirements.

Reflections

Observe, Reflect, and Make

I started this grand project with little knowledge of cryptocurrency and investment in general. Luckily I was given the opportunity to explore this new territory by starting trading cryptos myself with the support of the team. The design thinking started along with the crypto learning curve, I took notes of every mistake I made, frustration encountered, and confusion that needed help from the gurus. So I was able to record genuine user cases firsthand, then use them to come up with solutions, and validate the solutions later on by reconstructing scenarios.

Modularity for scalability

Our team spent months building a scalable design system that not only meets our short-term goals but also has the expandability to accommodate the growth. the OTC service was a great example of a modular, scalable system design that expedited our product development.

Out of sight, out of mind

A lot of my work in designing this product went to "minus" stuff. Blockchain and cryptocurrency brought the "disruptive" character into the financial world. As a FinTech product, our goal is to make investing in crypto simple. We focused on optimizing the information architecture, decluttering to improve affordances, hand over the right tool before the user asks. As emphasized in Nielsen's heuristics, "recognition rather than recall" is always a good idea when it comes to handling money, physical or digital.

It's been a journey for me! After 5 system modules, 169 distinctive components and pages, here are some of my takeaways from this project.

Refined Withdrawal Process

Converting between cash and cryptocurrencies is one of the most common obstacles that turn away new-comers. We focused on flattening the learning curve by streamlining the technical process, minimizing repetitive data entry, and bring the online-shopping experience into trading.

As demonstrated in this withdrawal interaction. Upon selecting the withdraw button in My Account page, the user is presented with a list of available withdrawal methods in a modal. The process is designed to guide the user through transactions in a fashion that's similar to online shopping. All vital numbers and terms are highlighted, with a clear indication of progress. And time-consuming data entries such as bank account information can be saved for future convenience.