Designing an End-to-end Options Trading Experience

As the lead designer, I led research initiatives and design activities to introduce a new Options Trading experience and asset expansion plan at DriveWealth. I worked alongside the Product Managers to define project goals and roadmap to plan and execute the design. I collaborated with cross-functional team members like SMEs, operational users and engineers to define requirements.

DriveWealth is a global B2B fin-tech technology platform offering brokerage APIs to power investing and trading experiences for equity securities. However, options have grown in popularity, and to keep up with demand–expanding tradeable asset classes was imperative. With this first launch, investors can buy call and put Options contracts. DriveWealth’s back office solutions powers the end-to-end Options Trading experiences from onboarding to account management, asset servicing to investing, and reporting to partner support.

For the first time, DriveWealth was expanding their range of asset classes to Options Trading. This meant that we had to design a solution with the existing infrastructure and APIs.

Additionally, learning Options Trading can be complex, but not impossible. It requires more financial literacy. We wanted to simplify the concept of Options Trading through design thinking and provide educational moments to allow people (our employees, partners and their end customers) to break down knowledge barriers.

Create an Options Trading experience that

1. Provides a seamless experience through the current infrastructure and platforms
2. Empower financial literacy through a simplified experience and highlight learning opportunities - “How do I explain Options Trading to a 10 year old?”

Business metrics: Increase product breadth; drive customer acquisition, engagement, retention and monetization

Design metrics: Increase user & stakeholder satisfaction, achieve design efficiency and maintain design consistency

How might we seamlessly simplify and integrate Options Trading into existing platforms?

The perfect design process doesn’t exist–each project warrants various tools, methodologies, and processes. As a seasoned designer, I have to evaluate business goals to ensure a project’s success and figure out the best solution for a design problem.

Tools: Figma, Figjam, Lucid Charts

Research Methods: A mix of User Interviews, Concept Testing, A/B Testing, Usability Testing

I worked closely with Product Managers to understand the why, the what and the hows–why are we building this Options Trading experience, what are we building, and how do we build and track success?

• Conduct interviews with SMEs and stakeholders to get an understanding of how Options Trading work and how they envision it to integrate with existing platforms
• Conduct interviews with the Options Operation teams to get an understanding on how the operational/servicing side works

In order to build a mental model around an Options investors, I had to conduct user interviews with retail investors to understand how they use the apps for general trading and expectations for Options and other asset types, and what are their jobs-to-be-done (JTBDs) to help inform design decisions.

Understanding a user's mental model and hurdles allow us to turn friction points into simple and delightful moments.

Option Trader Personas

Needs → Insights

• 🌟 Provide a simple platform to trade Options
• 🌟 Help me get started with Options Trading
• 🌟 Help me with different Options Trading strategies

I worked closely with the Product Manager to perform a gap analysis comparing current feature set and desired feature set in order to prioritize the MVP user flows.

I audited all the pages in the platform that touch multi-assets from a UX perspective. The challenges we faced were that most pages had technical constraints either through incompatible legacy code or missing API requirements. It took many discovery sessions to realize this project required larger API changes on top of visual and flow updates. We had to quickly extend our audit to gather technical feedback from API engineers.

In the middle of the project, we were faced with shifting business priorities at an organizational-level. Our new directions were to launch Mutual Funds (at the same time) and Fixed Income (as a fast follow). This meant that we had to pivot our design strategies to ensure a holistic multi-asset class expansion approach.

Our design had to be scalable, flexible, and product-agnostic to work with any new asset types including Options, Mutual Funds and Fixed Income.

1. Provides a seamless experience through the current infrastructure and platforms
2. Ensure the same process works on future asset class types --NEW!
3. Empower financial literacy through a simplified experience and highlight learning opportunities - “How do I explain Options Trading to a 10 year old?”

This new change required collaboration across multiple Product teams to define a product-agnostic strategy to support the new launch of Options, Mutual Funds and Fixed Income asset types.

I proposed and organized several workshops with Product stakeholders across the company to create a comprehensive plan for a multi-asset strategy. Using design thinking methods, we went through a few exercises to gain alignment across teams. In the end, we settled on an approach and plan of action to accomplish our objectives and goals.

An example of an Asset Class Matrix to show commonalities across asset types In order to understand the end-to-end journey, we needed to look at the entire Options Trading lifecycle:

• Onboarding
• Research
• Trading
• Portfolio Management
• Reporting

We mapped the life cycle to illustrate the various stages in the Options Trading experience, and highlighted opportunities where we can address user pain points. This allowed us to build better experiences knowing where we can make direct impact.

The way we design the API directly impacts what's displayed on the UI. It's a two-way street - the UX design influences the API design as well. This calls for a tight-knit collaboration to ensure we build the right APIs and in the right manner. Crafting an API with great UX involves following usability principles like ensuring accessibility, usability and usefulness.

I worked with API engineers to understand the data flow to and from the platform. I made sure the API design follows consistent patterns for example to display data by expiration dates, the API needs to pass the dataset with pagination by expiration dates. This approach eliminates the need for front-end handling, delegating that responsibility to the API to pass back data in a filterable way.

Designing How to Search for an Options Chain

After an investor buys a call Options contract, they have three choices: 1) Exercise their contract, 2) close it or, 3) let it expire. Each of these choices trigger a different workflow. I created infographics to help users understand and guide them on the different actions they can take.

Designing a Post-Order UI

Learning when to utilize what Options strategies involves basic understanding of how the market works. To promote and encourage the accessibility of Options Trading for everyone, I focused on breaking down complex concepts in layman’s terms. There were many points of frictions in the investor experience that provided the opportunity to educate and distill a complex idea into digestible steps.

The last stage of product development is implementation. I collaborated with developers for a smooth handoff of features and designs. What I found helpful was kicking off a meeting to give developers background context on the feature.

• Purpose, deliverables, goals
• Discuss user persona and journeys
• Review prioritized MVP user flows
• Demo the interactive prototype and design mocks
• Review technical feasibility and questions

It’s a chance to involve developers and ask them for feedback.

These collaboration sessions streamline development, ensuring clear understanding and reducing ambiguity. Developers have full access to all the design assets during sprints, and can reach out to me for design-related questions.

This project taught me about technical designs in the UI. Like UX/UI design, API design is iterative and collaborative. This newfound understanding enables me to think critically about the end-to-end product development, including how the data is structued and how it affects the UI. I now design better UX with APIs.

1. Delivered an end-to-end Options Trading experience using existing infrastructure and extending current trading APIs to support Options Trading
2. Created an investor journey to simplify understanding of entire Options Trading lifecycle and provide financial education on Options Trading strategies