All-Inclusive CFD App: Bridging the Gap Between Generations in Finance

World's Kindest Trading Interface made for thick and tiny fingers

Made for everyone, no matter the size of your finger. Does your thumb have huge muscles..? Then you'll enjoy Stryk!

It's the most easygoing UI for trading apps out there. I made it with a unique principle: With Stryk, you must be able to dodge cab drivers, trams and tourists with one eyeball while cruising your bike on the Amsterdam canals and open a trade on your mobile without crashing into the waters.

With micro animations, we captured the excitement of the stock market. You could almost feel quotes moving up and down, which to me was always a nice trill during market opening and closing times.

Stryk from BUX. The process behind a new name, logo and app icon

We learned from user research that Appstore and Google Play store visitors didn't get the distinct values between BUX X and BUX Zero. Reasons enough to revise the name of BUX X to a new Brand name. With the Brand division, we could focus on the different user groups and offer the right product.

Always a step ahead, I thought about the Stryk Brand a year from today when we started designing the new logo. There's always a choice: are we going out loud with a massive redesign, or will we ship updates with baby steps? The latter was our strategy. It prevents significant interruptions on engineering teams, and let's be honest, "users don't like changes no matter if they are good or bad". But thinking ahead helped me in selecting the right style for the logo. One of the brand changes we are discussing is changing the fonts, Cubano and Capita, to improve the accessibility of the app; this change is related to the logo. These criteria is taken in the design of the new logo and therefore make the brand ready for a new stage.

Stryk Icon

Remember the two most essential features of Stryk? Trading with leverage and Sort selling. If you look at the large image on top, You'll notice that we managed to "flip" the X and get the arrows trading up and down back into the icon. This might be more of an inside view on things, but we really loved it.  

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🥳 A double uplift in onboarding:
From 7% to 13% 

Stryk is an anonymous trading app with usernames. The idea back in 2014 was to build a gamified social trading infrastructure – with social events on the homepage, from Group battles, Star-traders and users who converted from Fun to SeriousBUX—a whole-level system to become a smart investor. The onboarding flow includes a screen for creating a username, which became a blocker in the flow, and we improved the screen with an automated username generator. This solution was relatively easy to implement, and the subsequent optimization was to assign a username that users could change from their profile screen.

Thank God it's Monday

The Markets are open again — time to read up, plan strategy, and look out for the quarterlies. What are quarterlies? Well, it's all about listed companies' reporting on their financial performance for the preceding three months. There's a lot of activity around these four moments a year, and we received feedback from our users that they missed opportunities. When we started to support our users with quarterlies, we published them within BUX-Channels (in the app). We created a unique channel where we broadcasted a simple image with the names and timestamps of the companies that would release numbers that day. Many followed the channel, but it was heavy on manual maintenance. However, we had enough data to buy in an automated feature. I think we build it in one or two sprints, and it's undoubtedly one of the better features for both the user and the business.