I had a demat account on this platform before I redesigned it — which meant I knew exactly where it was broken. App redesign and a professional trading terminal, for a legacy brokerage going fully digital.
Context
This is the digital trading platform of a legacy broking firm with 30+ years in the Indian market. I was using the app for my own trades before I ever sat down to redesign it. That's not a detail — it's the thing that made this project different.
When you're designing a trading platform as an active user, you don't just know what the research says is broken. You know the exact moment the app makes you anxious. You've mistyped an order price because the keypad was in the wrong position. You've lost track of a pending order because there's no way to surface it quickly. You've wished the charts were bigger and the bottom nav was smaller. The feedback loop between "I felt that" and "I need to fix that" collapses from weeks to seconds.
"The problem with fintech UX is that most designers have never placed a trade. I had. That context is worth more than any usability study."
The scope was split into two products: the mobile app (used by most retail traders) and the web terminal (a professional-grade platform for active and high-frequency traders). Both were redesigned, but with very different briefs.
The app's core job is simple: let someone see the market, make a decision, and place a trade without friction. Every extra tap, every misplaced element, every unclear label in that flow has a cost — real or psychological. The app redesign was focused on compressing that path without removing the depth that experienced traders rely on.
The orderpad is where money moves. It needed to be fast, confident, and impossible to misread. I redesigned it with a clear hierarchy — stock identity at top, action (Buy/Sell) next, price and quantity in that order — with buy/sell visually coded without relying on colour alone. Large touch targets throughout.
Typing a stock price on a mobile keyboard is an accident waiting to happen. I built a custom numeric keypad for price entry, with market-aware auto-suggestions: the current price, the bid, the ask, and the last traded price shown as quick-pick options. Most orders get placed in 2 taps instead of 8.
Traders often have multiple pending orders across related positions — averaging down on a stock, scaling into a trade. The app previously showed these as an undifferentiated list. I designed an order grouping view that surfaces the relationship between orders on the same instrument, showing the average price, combined exposure, and net P&L of the group at a glance.
One of the friction points I'd felt personally: if you're reading news or checking a chart and want to check your open positions, you have to navigate out, find the portfolio tab, then navigate back. The Dock is a persistent, collapsible panel that floats over any screen — showing your top watchlist items, open positions, and a quick-access button to the orderpad. You never have to leave where you are.
Active traders — the kind who are in the market every day, managing multiple positions, reading options chains, watching order books — need something a mobile app can't give them: screen real estate, density, and full control over their workspace. The Trading Terminal was designed for exactly that user.
The core design question was: how do you build a platform that's powerful enough for a professional but doesn't require a manual to use? The answer was a modular widget system with intelligent defaults.
The terminal is built on a configurable grid. Traders can add, remove, resize, and reposition any of 20+ widgets — charts, order book, positions, P&L, options chain, market depth, news, screener, watchlists, and more. Each widget is a self-contained module that pulls its own data. The layout can be saved and named, so a trader's "morning scan" setup is different from their "intraday trading" setup.
An empty canvas is intimidating. The terminal launches with a pre-built default layout that covers the essentials: a large chart, a watchlist, positions, and an orderpad sidebar. Power users immediately start customising. New terminal users have something that works from the first open. The onboarding didn't need to explain the widgets — the default layout demonstrated them.
Clicking a stock in the watchlist widget updates the chart widget, the order book, and the options chain simultaneously. This "linked symbol" model means the terminal behaves like a unified workspace rather than a collection of independent panels. It was the single most requested feature in our early feedback sessions with active traders.
Terminal widget library:
Key Decisions
The temptation was to build two apps: one for beginners, one for pros. We didn't. Instead, the app uses progressive depth — simple views that reveal more as the user explores. A new trader sees a clean price chart and a simple orderpad. An experienced trader finds the full options data, bracket orders, and advanced chart types without needing to switch modes. One product, one design system, the right level of complexity at the right time.
Watchlists sync. Orders placed on the terminal appear in the app. Alerts set on mobile show up in the terminal. The two products share a design language — same tokens, same component logic, same data model in the UI — so moving between them doesn't require learning a new interface. This was a design constraint I pushed for early and built into the system before a single screen was final.
In trading platforms, green and red carry meaning that overrides everything else. But 8% of users have red-green colour deficiency. Every colour-coded element in the platform — prices, P&L, order status, chart lines — has a secondary signal: a symbol, a label, a position in the UI. Colour communicates faster when it's not doing all the work alone.
Outcomes
The Dock feature became one of the most-used elements in the redesigned app within weeks of launch — something I noticed because I was still trading on it myself. The terminal's widget system gave the team a scalable framework for adding new data sources without a redesign each time. The design system built across both products now covers 70+ components and is the foundation for all new platform features.
Confidential Work
This project is under NDA. I can walk you through every flow, every decision, and every screen in a private conversation — or show you the live product. Request the deck below, or just ask.
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