Design critique of Binance homepage

The cryptocurrency and blockchain space will fail to reach its full potential if we do not pay attention to the users who will interact with it on a daily basis. The following critique series is meant to inspire teams to build products that users love. These products should not just solve a need or sound cool, but be a delight to use.

Binance is a leading cryptocurrency exchange. They launched 6 months ago and recently became a unicorn (1 billion dollar or more valuation) making them one of, if not the fastest unicorn to every be created. On a peak day last quarter they had “over 10 bn USD worth of cryptos change hands, averaging $110,000 USD / second”. That’s simply incredible.

Binance is supposedly adding millions of new customers every week. They get 25,000 support tickets a day (and have a 20 person support team). They are a once in a generation company. I am a user and I respect their team greatly.

But their design sucks.

The major exchanges (including Binance’s competitors) design ineptitude is inevitably hurting them. It costs them millions of dollars. Makes it difficult for new users to join, participate and enjoy the cryptocurrency space. And undoubtedly fuels their customer support backlog.

The Binance homepage has a lot of information, but does not direct users on what to do or where to focus.

While Binance started as a platform for sophisticated traders, it is one of the few places that allows people to trade a large variety of altcoins. Given the mainstream media’s cryptocurrency hype, we know that many more users are joining the movement and want to partake in trading. Binance recently crossed the 6,000,000 user mark and I can guarantee that a good portion of those people are novice traders.

The first challenge I face when I land on this page is “where do I begin?”. I am bombarded with information:

• Detailed navigation bar
• Promotional content
• Mysterious bar of text — maybe news
• Boxes that have numbers and a subtle chart in them
• Giant table of currency pairs

None of these sections have labels. There is no clear way of understanding what a section is for. A designer should never assume a user will know what a section of content is for.

Beyond that there is no clear action for me to take. What should I do? Why should I do it? What is my purpose on this page?

While being able to browse the markets (more on this in a moment) is useful, it is not actionable if I don’t have an an account with funds (coins/tokens) in it.

This leads me to the three main actions Binance should be directing people towards:

• Create an account or login to an existing account — Every action on Binance requires you to have an account.
• Fund your account — Binance is not like Coinbase where you can link your bank account or credit card and buy currency. You need to transfer cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Ether and use that to trade.
• Find a currency to trade — Once you have added currency to your account that you can trade with (namely Bitcoin or Ether) you can then find a coin you would like to trade for. This is in theory handled by the currency pair table, but CMON!

The first action is buried in the header. The second action is not only not displayed, but also not explained. The third action exists, but downplays the search feature.

It would be prudent to include a more prominent sign up button given that the site is almost useless without having an account.

A quick 5 minute shuffling of the homepage to emphasize the sign up area. There’s a lot of work that could still be done on the visual side to make the homepage more actionable and clear.

Once I have an account and am logged in, I need to have funds in my account to trade. When I first create an account, I need to transfer in cryptocurrency from other wallets I control. I can only imagine the number of support tickets Binance receives because they don’t make it clear that you need to fund your account. They don’t even show you how to fund your account!

When a user is logged in and has no coins in their account, large CTAs should be present across the site encouraging them to deposit cryptocurrencies. This CTA should be followed with clear instructions on how to actually deposit.

A rough wireframe of how — after a user is logged in — Binance could encourage people to deposit funds so they could get the most value out of the site.

I’ve funded my account and am ready to make my first trade! How might I find something to trade? I might use the boxes at the top to discover coins. After all these boxes represent coins that have made big moves up (or down) or have had a sharp increase in the volume of transactions.

There should be a header that describes what this section is for and labels indicating why each box is displayed.

In many scenarios, I have already done my research elsewhere. I am not logging in to Binance to discover a new opportunity to trade. In this case, I want to search for the precise currency to trade. While this is possible on the current interface, the search is hidden.

Binance should make the search bar prominent and include a label like “Find a token / coin to trade”.

Binance can still include their table of popular cryptocurrencies for advanced users.

A rough wireframe highlighting a label for the boxes as well as a more clear trading / search interface. It may be prudent to include the token search in the header as well.

Binance should be directing users through a clear flow:

1. Create an account
2. Fund account
3. Find something to trade
4. Execute trade

These wireframes were done in about 15 minutes. They are rough. But I hope they show how we can use design to more clearly redirect people through the key actions. It would be prudent for Binance to do a more thorough redesign to focus on cleaning up the design and giving users precisely what they need at a given time.

Later I will provide a similar set of thoughts on the Binance Trading and Deposit page. If there are other critiques you would like to see, please let me know.

Any other changes that you would make? Do any of my recommendations strike you as incorrect? Please weigh in below!