Welcome back to the third episode of UX Teardown! This week we are going to look at a stock trading app: Robinhood. It was a fun one because I have ZERO experience with stocks, finance, or trading. But long story short, Robinhood made it very easy and hassle-free for a beginner to pick up this seemingly daunting task. Anyway, let’s get started!
Short-and-Sweet Onboarding
Robinhood’s onboarding experience is relatively simple and easy. From signing up, to linking bank accounts, to actually purchasing stocks — it only took me 5 minutes. From the perspective of a mobile user, quick onboarding is key. No one is going to spend more than a few minutes signing boring documents and waiting for approval.
It’s a tricky balance for a platform that deals with private information and (potentially, a lot of) money. Robinhood makes it easy but not sloppy. The step-by-step guide makes me think of TurboTax tax-filing experience. There are no long forms and very little chance to make errors.
After the onboarding process, users are able to start trading right away. Even if you install the app during after hours (which I did), you can still submit your order, which gives the users a lot of freedom.
Onboarding is all about getting users from zero knowledge to performing tasks with your product. If you can’t help the users achieve what they want to achieve in a timely manner, they are going to bail fast. In this case, if users have to wait even a few more minutes to get their account, a lot of them are going to drop off and find alternatives.
Clean Dashboard
On the dashboard, you are able to see a graph of how your portfolio is performing. There’s also a news section as well as a list of the apps you are following. If you click on any of the stocks, you can go into each stock’s detail page.
Robinhood does a fantastic job in making sure the dashboard is clean and informative. Its use of very legible font and layout made the hierarchy very clear.
Simple Color Scheme
Robinhood has a very simplistic color palette: green, red, white, and black. Users can quickly get a sense of how the market and the portfolio are doing. One small detail I noticed is that Robinhood doesn’t use the tone of ‘pure red’ (#ff0000) that usually symbolizes warning; instead, they added an orange hint into their red. It makes the red more cheerful, and less error-like. After all, it doesn’t feel good when you see the market being a bloody sea of red.
Inverting the background color from white (trading time) to black (off-trading time) is a very bold, yet clever idea. The 2 highlighter colors (green and red) are also very well chosen because they stand out of the screens immediately against either background.
In terms of gestures, Robinhood also utilizes a variety of gesture controls. For example, you can drag along the graph to see a specific point in time. And for more crucial actions, such as purchasing stocks (which requires some ‘double checks'), users have to swipe instead of tap.
Easy Navigation
Thanks to the simpleness of the app, there are not many pages to navigate within the app. In fact, there are only 2 pages: the main dashboard and the detail stock page. One tiny hiccup I found is that they use the menu icon as the button to ‘go back’ from the detail stock page to the dashboard. Simply having a back button or an exit icon will be a better option. Another shortfall in terms of navigation is that clicking on any news article will take users out of the app. So it takes some serious back and forth, in and out, to browse the news. The reading experience can be much smoother if Robinhood can host in-app articles to avoid the disruptive reading experience.
Opportunities for Improvement
As a dashboard and trading tool, Robinhood is a very well-designed app. However, that doesn’t mean it is forever limited to only being a trading tool. Below are some thoughts and ideas that may help Robinhood become less transactional and more integrated to the end-to-end investing experience.
Adding Elements of Education
As a beginner investor that wants to learn more about stocks, I spent way too much time staring at the ups and downs of my portfolio and searching random stocks this past week. Robinhood has the potential to give me some useful information that will help me become a better investor.
I’m not saying that Robinhood should turn into a ‘Stock 101’ or ‘Investing for Dummies,’ but some investment educations can help beginners build a better brand. For example, as a beginner, I really want to learn what the pros are doing. What types of stocks are they investing? When do they buy or sell stocks? ‘Elite portfolios’ might be something worth exploring.
Adding Research Capabilities
After getting some opinions from more advanced investors, it seems like Robinhood can also improve some of its research capabilities. Not surprisingly, investors use Robinhood solely for ordering stocks. They have to turn to other platforms to gather more in-depth reports and news. It sounds like a huge gap to fill. Why not have everything in one place? Getting users to stay in the app longer increases the chance of building some long-term relationships and not just a transactional relationship.
Adding Social Capabilities
Investing stock can be a highly social activity. However, Robinhood has almost none of the social aspects. Investors, both new and advanced, hope to get a pulse of the market, which is essentially a collection of people’s decisions and activities. So why not add in some forum-like features? Stocktwits.com is an example of a platform where traders can share their opinions and learn from others. I believe Robinhood will benefit a lot if it starts exploring some social capabilities in its app.
Business Model
Lastly, I just want to touched upon the business model of Robinhood, which is not UX, but interesting nonetheless. One of the most compelling reasons for people to use Robinhood is that it offers zero commission fee. Searching around the Internet, I found out that commission-free is a big deal in the investment world. Customers typically have to pay at least a few dollars for each transaction. Then the question in my mind became: how does Robinhood make money? It turns out that Robinhood earns money by collecting interests on the (non-investment) cash in its account.
Robinhood also has a premium account called Robinhood Gold, which gives customers some additional perks such as after-hours trading, more buying power, and faster access to funds. All are optional ‘power-ups’.
As I mentioned in the previous improvements section, Robinhood can potentially develop more advanced features (such as elite picks, proprietary content) that are only available for premium account users.
That’s it for this week’s UX teardown. If you enjoyed this article, hit that heart ❤️ and share it with the world 👍. See you next time!
