There are over 2,000,000 apps on the Apple App Store. A few of them are tackling the naive investors space. One of them is my all-time favorite. Everyone’s talking about it since 2014. Over 400,000 people were on its waitlist at one point. Apple thinks it’s the most well-designed app of 2014.

It’s Robinhood, the zero commission trading app on mobile devices.

What is Robinhood?

Robinhood is a mobile stock trading app that allows you to trade stocks and ETFs (exchange-traded funds, a type of security product that bundles the financial performance of multiple companies in a single stock-like security that investors can trade on the secondary financial markets) without charging any commission, which essentially means you can trade stocks for free.

Before Robinhood, there isn’t a single company that had dared to do this, since commissions are a fundamental part of traditional brokerages’ income. Today, if you use a traditional broker to invest in stocks, you are charged a fee of around 10 dollars for every buy/sell trade that you place.

That’s why when Robinhood first came out, students and young professionals alike, went crazy about it and all of a sudden, even people around me that I never thought would trade stocks were on their waitlist for their account applications to be processed so they can start trading for free.

Robinhood also offers T+0 with the new Robinhood Instant feature and margins account (borrowing on margin means that an investor use borrowed money from their brokers to trade stocks and earn profits) with the Robinhood Gold premium offering. It offers everything a beginning-to-intermediate user would ever need from their stock broker with a simplistic mobile app, completely cutting off significant costs of any brick-and-mortar stores and redundant operations staff.

Why is it my favorite app out of 2,000,000 potential candidates?

I started using Robinhood in 2014 when I was a sophomore at Stanford. Prior to that, I had never traded a single stock in the financial markets and had been pretty unconfident in my abilities to handle the complexity of stock trading with real money. However, the simplistic user interface and the smooth flow of the app soon made me realize that my previous concerns were unnecessary. I was so excited and glad that I was stepping into the financial world and one step closer to improving my personal finance and becoming financially independent. All within the first day of using the app.

Many younger users of Robinhood just like myself expressed similar feelings.

The great user experience that Robinhood creates really sets it apart. Specifically, below are my three highlights of the App:

1. Single View Application Interface.

If you haven’t heard about the simplistic design of Robinhood you might be thinking about an interface like this:

or this:

However, Robinhood is none of the above.

Robinho0d is simply a single-view application that allows user to scroll down vertically to view the watch-list, tap on a stock to see that stock page, and hit a button to buy or sell a stock.

For the target users of Robinhood, the majority of which are millennials who would be turned down by the infinite number of options presented on the same screen as many professional traders would prefer, a clean, simplistic UI design that “hides” functions until they are needed and does that in a natural, unobtrusive way, easily won over the heart of the so-called “naive investors”.

2. Cards View Used to Display Information.

No matter how simple the app is, it must ultimately provide user with the necessary information they need to trade. Robinhood does this elegantly with its unique cards-view on the main screen, which would display news and notifications as soon as the user enters the app, calling for attention items that requires immediate action.

Users can easily swipe right or left to navigate through the cards in a simple way. The relatively large font size and easy-to-understand language used to convey the messages are highly user-friendly as they are designed to minimize stress when using the product.

3. The Swipe-up Motion to Submit Order.

Another signature feature of Robinhood is the unique way to submit an order — you simply swipe up the confirmation card to send it to the server. The swift and active motion of swiping up closely resembles the act of throwing a messenger pigeon to the sky in the good old days, granting user a psychological relieve and sense of achievement every time they submit an order.

This motion in the long run encourages user to submit order and serves as a “sticky” habit that Robinhood users all share. For Robinhood, a financial services startup that doesn’t charge user on each trade, cultivating the habit of submitting orders is improving its daily active user rate and user activities, which ultimately benefits the company and looks good in front of VCs.

What can Robinhood improve upon going forward?

Although Robinhood is a great trading app that is democratizing the financial markets, it still has certain important limitations and is facing severe competition from traditional brokerage firms who have already adopted mobile technology and are increasingly moving towards more user-friendly design. In addition, personal finance startups such as Mint and Clarity Money are also taking stakes from the market.

Going forward, I think Robinhood has several ways of improving its product and overall user experience:

1. Provide more and better access to trading-related information in-app.

The current cards view design is a great example of utilizing limited screen real-estate to display essential information in a manner that’s easy to follow and convenient. However, an issue with the cards design is that the current design doesn’t allow user to go back to a previous card. This could easily be fixed by allowing user to swipe right for next and swipe left for a previous card.

Moreover, this space would also be used to display more customized subscription news, stock performance, tools for analysis that might come in handy, or even bring up a more complicated professional k-chart interface for advanced users with the tap of a button.

2. Release a desktop application for both mac and windows.

Currently Robinhood only offers a mobile application, although many users have long-demanded a desktop application that would sync well with the mobile device. The desktop app could increase the usage and improve UX by allowing the user to access other financial information at their desktop while making trades, which could essentially turn naive users into more advanced traders who are more committed to using the platform.

A great example of this type of integration is Slack, which is a tool for effective team communication that many techies and professionals love to use for work. Its desktop app syncs seamlessly with the mobile app while giving user more comfort when operating more complicated functions such as handling multiple streams or uploading/downloading files.

3. Offer more sophisticated features overtime and invest in user education.

Last but not the least, while Robinhood started with naive investors who are new to the financial markets world, the app is about 4 years old and the initial users who are the majority of the U.S. user base are turning into more advanced users. If Robinhood wants to maintain its stellar performance and user satisfaction, it needs to do more for its users besides simplify the trading process. Robinhood needs to provide more sophisticated features and improve the availability of financial product offerings, such as shorting stocks and using leverage, so that the product can grow along with its users.

Also, to better serve its mission of democratizing the financial markets, Robinhood needs to proactively provide more resources for its beginner level users to learn the basics of the financial markets more quickly and foster a community of investors around Robinhood.

All in all, I have been pleasantly surprised by how Robinhood was able to tackle so complicated a space as the financial markets and transform it to fit the financial needs of the millennial users. I am confident that as long as Robinhood doesn’t stop here and keeps improving, just as its users have been, it will continue to be an increasingly successful business that changes the world for the better.