UX Critique of Trading Apps

Adisa Joshua Oyelakin
4 min readJun 14, 2021

So basically, I was giving a project to work on at futureacademy africa where I am currently doing my internship. The project was to pick a category of applications and do a critique of the UX and note how it could be improved.

This actually gave me a tough time at first as i was just getting to understand what UX really meant and how to really spot UX in an application or website. One of the things I did first was to do a lot of research with videos and articles on what bad UX would mean in several instances, watched people critique of applications on YouTube before even picking a category of applications to do a critique on. While doing this i was just taking everything in and checking various apps on my mobile phone.

Finally i settled with The financial trading apps pf which are Trust wallet, Meta4trader and Octafx applications. I had been using some of this apps before and never thoroughly something was wrong with them, but looking again with my UX eyes(lol) I saw a few things that could be improved on which i would be sharing .

  1. TRUST WALLET

use the number in the picture to navigate and read through

So while taking a look at this cryptocurrency trading app which i have used a number of times but after my study and research i looked critically at it again. Some of the things I noted that the experiences would be better.

  1. (1)On screen A the lines that separated all the coins and the whole list felt looks real tacky and choked as though the spacing is not enough a good example is how the WhatsApp arranged their list and also did nit make the border line extended to the icons.
  2. (2) in a trading app that has to do with money data show that many people want to be in control and want to be secretive about their account balance so to make this experience better a button to hide the balance whenever they want too, the user might be in the public and not want his account trading balance to be seen by a stranger, binance has this special feature.
  3. (3) The icon that was placed here does nit interpreted what it is, looking at it it looks' like a filter button button meanwhile if you click on it its actually a search option that is made available.

SCREEN B

This whole screen looks too tacky, the visual hierarchy is not properly placed, the fonts weights also makes the whole screen . So making this screen visually appealing would mean giving it more whitespace and also using the hierarchy well based on order of importance.

2.OCTAFX TRADING APP.

a.) Basically in this application the colors used where too much 5 different colors with different contrast applied to them, it makes the visuals less appealing

b.) the functionality of being able to hide your balance is going to be very helpful in this case also.

c.) The setting icon put there is not very important to the screen it was and also the settings was only to navigate from the dark mode to dark mode of which its essentiality is not relevant to that particular screen which might distract the user.

d. On the screen A where the login page is, where the sign up with google or Facebook option is , for usability of users the other options would make the user experience better and less stressful if it were below where the thumb of the user could easily reach along with the white spacing on the page.

e.) On screen B the login to existing account page the white spacing is not properly placed, and also for the login button it to close to the input field and the text login in the button is too small.

3. META4 TRADER

a.)So basically this my favorite app but while reviewing this the icons on the navigation bar, on this application the icons on the nerve bar is 6 icons which is too much according to user experience principle it should not be more than 4–5 navigation icon , meanwhile there are some icon that are not really used by most traders apart from the first four navigation icons, implementing this would make the never bar more spacious and more visually appealing.

Also applying the functionality of been able to hide your balance and unhide it . Also the logout button should be easier to find on screen D for better user experience.

While working on these from statistics and my use of this application in know traders want to be alerted of how their trades is going so as to control their trades and be able to focus on somethings else while their trades go on which could be added screen C but understanding how that might not be functional because in the financial market brokers want people emotional about their trades and also they prefer people to loose money.

So this was how the experience of me criticizing the application went. It was an enjoyable and tasking process.

Thanks for reading. Do well to drop your comments.

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