Making margin trading readable for people who have never traded.

Two audiences pulling in opposite directions.

50K had to work for a first-time investor who needs context and guardrails, and for an experienced trader who expects density and speed. The work was never about removing complexity. It was about revealing the right thing at the right moment, and being honest about the rest.

• Regulation isn't a design preference. As a CySEC-licensed firm, certain risk disclosures must appear, in specific places, at specific moments. You design around them, not over them.
• Every number moves. Prices, margin and P&L change underneath the layout. Anything that only looks right at rest is broken.
• 390 points of width. Chart, price, sentiment, funds, controls and disclosure all compete for the same phone screen.
• Three surfaces, one team. App, internal admin and marketing all had to stay recognisably the same product.

Mostly one designer, inside a startup.

Five moments, one continuous decision.

Everything in the product sits on this spine. When a new feature was proposed, the first question was which of these five moments it belonged to — and what it would push out of the way.

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Registration and identity verification.

KYC is the highest-friction part of any regulated trading product. It is mandatory, document-heavy, legally worded and very easy to abandon halfway through. 50K's original flow was the conventional one: long forms, several questions per screen, an upload step that punished you for a bad photo.

I rebuilt it around four ideas. The flow below is the shipped one, in order.

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Six screens from the shipped flow. The bar at the top of every question screen is the whole argument: at no point are you asked to trust that this ends.

• One question per step. A single decision on screen, in plain language, instead of a page of fields.
• Say why. Every request that feels intrusive — income, experience, whether you're a politically exposed person — explains what it's for before it asks.
• Complete transparency on progress. Where you are, what's left, and what happens after. No open-ended waiting.
• Acknowledge small wins. Finishing a step is confirmed, not silently accepted. It sounds small; over seven steps it's the difference between a form and a conversation.

The measure that mattered was not sign-ups but funded accounts — how many people who started actually finished verification and could trade. That is the number this rebuild was aimed at.

Order entry, where design becomes money.

This is the screen most trading apps get wrong. It's also the one where an interface decision turns directly into a financial consequence, so it earned the most iteration. The animation at the top of this page is the real flow; here is the same screen, decision by decision.

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1. 1Direction first. Short or Buy, with both live prices, before anything else is asked.
2. 2Required margin is the headline. Position value and share count sit under it as supporting detail, because they aren't what leaves your balance.
3. 3Both outcomes, equally weighted. Likely profit and likely loss over the next hour, shown together. Only showing the upside would be a design choice too.
4. 4Depth stays one tap away. Limit price and stop levels live under More Options — present for the people who want them, invisible to everyone else.
5. 5The funds check resolves before the button. Sufficient or insufficient funds is answered above the confirm action, not after you press it.

The states below the happy path were designed with the screen rather than patched on afterwards: market closed, price moved since you opened the ticket, insufficient funds, order rejected, limit order pending, and the confirmation itself. In a trading product the edge state is the product — it's the moment someone decides whether to trust you.

Making market data answer a question.

Most financial data arrives as a table. A table is honest and almost useless to someone deciding whether to buy something. The insight components exist to turn a dataset into a sentence a person can act on — and to be unambiguous about how confident that sentence is.

The components as they ship, light and dark. Each one leads with the finding — “Apple is at a 1 month peak”, “4.2 average rate” — and keeps the data that produced it visible underneath, so the shortcut never hides the evidence.

The same rule runs through all of them: state the conclusion in words, show the data behind it, and make both actions that follow equally easy to take. A card that only offered Buy would be a recommendation, and I'm not licensed to make one. Even the margin alert follows it — the worst moment in the product states plainly what is happening and gives you the one action that helps.

One product, one visual language.

The app, the internal tools and the marketing site were drifting into three separate visual products. A campaign would invent a shade of green; admin would invent a table style. Every fix was a conversation about taste rather than a lookup.

I built shared foundations — logo lockups, colour, typography, iconography, illustration and components — and, importantly, designed the light and dark palettes as a pair rather than deriving one from the other. Marketing and admin live in light; the trading app lives in dark; they had to be the same brand at full strength in both.

Foundations, icon library, illustration set and a component in use — the light half of the system. Every app screen further up this page is the dark half. Same brand at full strength in both.

The motion layer

Motion ships as part of the system, not on top of it. I animate the micro-interactions in After Effects and deliver them to the app as Lottie — deposits, rewards, confirmations, empty states — so the product moves the same way everywhere, at a few kilobytes each.

What the system changed in practice: engineering stopped guessing, visual QA became a check against a spec instead of a matter of opinion, and the gap between the marketing site and the product it was selling closed.

What changed.