Rethinking how traders exit their positions
Options are extremely risky and volatile instruments. Traders dealing with these options must react quickly and exit their trades to secure profits. Flow to place exit order involved multiple steps that resulted in losses.
Additionally, 70% of all options traders exited within the first 15 minutes, indicating that traders are constantly monitoring the market and closing trades as soon as they achieve profits. In that case, ensuring quick exit order placement was crucial.
About Groww
Groww is a trading platform, similar to Robinhood, serving millions of traders. Most traders on the platform are option buyers who profit from sudden moves in market.
My Role
Led the research and design, and took ownership of the product to launch it on iOS, Android, and the web.
Team
PM: Aayush Sharma & Aman
Engg: Brijesh Maserani & Anand Mishra
Outcomes
I designed the Fast Exit Framework, which enables traders to exit positions while remaining on the Positions tab. Allows traders to exit trades while monitoring their total returns.
Currently live for all users on Groww.
Steps reduced from
4 to 2
Daily users
50,000+
Retention • Week 7
38%
Trader problems
Trader trade risky options because they are cheaper
An option is a contract that gives you the right to buy or sell a stock at a specific price on or before a certain date, in exchange for a small upfront fee. Apple stock might be priced at $100, but an option could cost just $10, allowing people to trade with less money.
Price changes every 0.3 second
Options are very volatile, and this $10 premium can quickly rise to $20 or drop to zero in seconds. Therefore, decisions must be made fast. Option buyers take advantage of this volatility to make quick profits, so timing is crucial.
STORYBOARD OF A TRADER
For an options trader, exiting a trade at the right moment is crucial. In just seconds, losses can multiply significantly.
Problems with the current experience
It required 4 steps to place an exit order
To exit a specific position, traders had to navigate the entire ordering flow. This multi-step process took at least three seconds, leading to significant price fluctuations. If you had a position with a $100 profit, by the time you place the exit order and return to your positions, only $80 is booked!
CURRENT FLOW TO EXIT A POSITION
Exit all, was a good alternative, but not sufficient
Positions tab has a feature called Exit All, which lets you exit your trades at the best market price. This feature is great when traders want to exit all trades at once, but it doesn't work if you only want to exit two trades out of four.
EXIT ALL FLOW
Trader POV
"When markets become volatile, I want to exit my positions as quickly as possible. The current experience is diminishing my profits."
Process
The flow to exit a single trade is 4 steps longs
BREAKDOWN THE FLOW
However, 85% people exit their trade in full
Current process is valuable if you want to partially exit your position. For example, if you are trading 1000 shares and want to sell 500, this flow lets you do that. However, 85% of users tend to sell all 1000 shares at once when they see their desired returns.
SPLIT OF ORDERS
For 85% of orders can we design something simpler?
If most orders placed are at market and of full quantity can this be a shortcut surfaced somewhere on positions itself?
Exit all is important but not always useful
Traders often have several trades and will use Exit All only if they want to close everything.
EXIT ALL PLACEMENT
Iterations
Idea A: Adding a shortcut to exit in bottomsheet
ITERATIONS IDEA A
Exiting a position still requires two clicks. While testing with traders, I discovered that monitoring total returns is more important for decision-making than focusing solely on position-specific returns.
Idea B: Traders can enable an instant exit button
ENABLE INSTANT EXIT FROM SETTINGS
This approach was by far the fastest way to exit positions. Critical issue was miss taps, what if you wanted to click on the position but you clicked on instant and it exited all the positions.
Balancing speed with intent.
DERIVED DESIGN TENET
Exit option should be upfront, yet layered. Designed to take action on individual trades. Elegant & simple 🌼
Idea C: Instant exit at position level
What if we could surface an exit button at on each position? Inspired by the swipe-to-delete feature in Gmail and combined that with the seriousness a financial platform requires.
SWIPE VS TAP INTERACTION
Choosing tap over swipe: In this case, swipe is used as an interaction pattern to switch between tabs. You can swipe to navigate between explore, positions, and orders.
Concept of an exit button on positions really resonated with traders. Testing different versions of this idea revealed that this pattern should support a single primary action, such as exiting. This built confidence and made the experience feel more intuitive.
POSITION LIST ITEM UI EXPLORATIONS
Introducing Fast Exit
Each position features a Fast Exit button, allowing users to close trades one by one with clear returns and less slippage. Tapping on the right side of the positions list opens a side drawer with the Fast Exit button, which exits the trade when tapped.
INTERACTION FAST EXIT
Side drawer allows users to exit each trade directly from their positions. For the 85% of users who wish to exit their entire position, this offers a much quicker solution.
Only one drawer opens at a time
The product team asked to enable users to open multiple drawers simultaneously. I made a case that this would disrupt the consistency of the position tab and is not a familiar interaction pattern for mobile UX.
DESIGN DECISION
Designed for web
Current web UI
Challenge was to integrate Fast Exit without cluttering the UI. Simply adding a button to each list item felt redundant. I utilized hover toolkit to display the Fast Exit button, keeping the UI clean and contextual.
Web UI with Fast Exit
Learnings
From the users
Reached out to traders, they described the experience as quick. Traders mentioned they could exit positions at the right time and secure more profits, which they had previously lost due to slippage.
USER FEEDBACK FROM APPSTORE
As a designer
Balancing speed, security, and elegance was challenging.
Fast solutions often led to unforeseen consequences, while safe ones failed to address the problem. This case study required careful trade-offs to achieve an elegant outcome.
Trusting my intuition as a designer,
I initially aligned with stakeholders on the bottom sheet approach. However, during prototyping and play testing, I realised it wasn't quite right. I requested a few days to test with users and developed a layered approach for positioning, ultimately designing the interaction with AI tools and incorporating haptics into the final product.
HAPTICS DOCUMENTATION
Thanks for reading
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