Pocket Trader Revamp Part I: Social features
Overview
This is a revamp of the Pocket Trader community experience. We aimed to cultivate a trader community to enhance trader engagement.
Pocket Trader is a social trading platform that provides users trading CFDs in forex, Indices, Commodities, and ETFs. It also incorporates social trading features, allowing users to connect, and follow successful traders within the community.
My roles
Lead designer — partners with the marketing teams to drive the overall campaign.
Team
Austin Fisher, UXW Dean Whillier, UXE Bryan Coutch, SWE Ben Whittaker, SWE Christina Lee, PM
Timeline & Status
2 Months,
Launched in January 2023
Opportunity
A transformation from a conventional forex trading app to a forex social trading platform that caters to the younger generation with an interactive trading community.
There is a gap between new-generation traders and large forex trading platforms. They can find it challenging to navigate the intricacies and understand how to utilize the available tools effectively. So, Pocket Trader 2.0 aimed to flip the script with a refreshing approach that speaks to new-generation traders on the path to an interactive and dynamic social trading experience.
Research
How do the younger traders feel regarding the trader community provided by forex trading platforms today?
💩 Lack of Interactivity
Traders may not actively know each other. It lacks opportunities for dialogue, collaborative problem-solving, or the exchange of diverse perspectives.
💩 No incentive to share
Sharing within a trading community involves a significant investment of time and effort. Some traders want to keep their limited knowledge private by typing it out.
💩 Lack of trust & credibility
The inability to view other traders' portfolios creates a sense of opacity. Traders may have concerns about the presence of market makers or fake accounts, which can lead to a reluctance to engage with the trading community.
How might we cultivate a trader community that fosters collaboration, knowledge sharing, and meaningful connections so that the engagement of traders can be enhanced?
Directions
🧐 Help and motivate users to discover potential traders
Empower traders to discover who have demonstrated strong performance or fruitful insights to follow or learn from them.
🧐 Provide social tools to promote knowledge-sharing
Streamline the content creation process for traders, reducing their effort in generating original content.
🧐 Enhance social recognition and validation
Provide social validation for successful traders. To enhance their reputation within the community and attract followers looking for traders with a proven track record of success.
Design Principle
Balance transparency and privacy of traders
Protect sensitive information of traders, such as their account balances, while showing enough stats for traders to share their successful strategies or records.
Facilitate social interaction with ease
Provide opportunities for traders to connect and engage with each other in trading activities.
Design and refine
During the design exploration phase, I focused on various ways to present the card design of various tasks. The following factors were taken into account:
Task name/requirement
Reward amount
Different forms of progress bar, including showing the percentage completed or highlighting specific milestones.
Position of claim button
Expected
Users have a clear understanding of two forms of progress bars in one task card.
With specific milestones, users can keep trading until they achieve the final rewards.
Acutal
They mistakenly thought they could only claim once with the milestones design
After the first few attempts, I go back to conservative design with one form of progress bar only. With several grooming and testing, I found the following for improvement:
The display of reward amount is not dominant enough.
The checkmark can be replaced by the progress bar.
Gamify factors can be added to the progress bar design to attract users for task completion.
Solution
🤩 Gamify leaderboard and various social widgets
Gamify leaderboard:
Create a competitive and enjoyable environment where traders strive to improve their rankings in Profit and Loss, return made, and Win rate, thereby attracting users who are interested in following or learning from experienced traders.Most Follower and Most Active widgets:
Create a mini leaderboard across different platform sections to enhance the visibility of successful traders and their rankings. To make it easier for users to identify and connect with successful traders.
🤩 Feed with share trades, testament, and hashtag features
Share trades feature
Traders can effortlessly visualize and share their strategies without the need for screen captures using them for sharing open trades, profit, and loss.Testament feature
In addition to the benefits of being easy to share, the inclusion of bullish, bearish, and neutral labels allows other traders to identify the viewpoint of the post owner quickly.
🤩 In-depth social trader profile:
Year to date Return widget and mini trader dashboard
Evaluate traders’ consistent success over a reasonable period and their risk management based on their return and profit & lossTrade records
Analyzing historical data reveals traders' position sizes and capital usage, enabling the identification of their trading patterns and styles, such as day trading, swing trading, or position trading.Trader personal feed
Assess the alignment between a trader's shared insights and their trade record, one can enhance the credibility of their opinions.
@2025 Leo Lau | “Good ideas are always crazy until they’re not.”