Stocktwits

Owned end-to-end design execution, transforming concepts into polished, scalable user experiences through research synthesis, user flows, wireframes, and interactive prototypes across web and mobile platforms.

Collaborated cross-functionally to steer product direction—balancing user needs, technical feasibility, and business objectives—to inform strategic planning and feature rollout.

Transformed user research insights into design strategy and execution, ensuring product decisions were grounded in real customer needs and behavioral data.

Led data-informed iteration cycles, leveraging feedback loops to refine UX and elevate performance KPIs across usability and customer satisfaction.

My Role

Team Composition:

2 iOS Developers • 1 PM • 1 QA Engineer • 1 Data Analyst

Partnered across disciplines—product, engineering, QA, and data—to ensure designs translated seamlessly into production and supported cross-platform cohesion.

Led recurring design reviews to encourage open feedback, ensure consistency, and keep cross-functional teams aligned around evolving design priorities.

Facilitated cross-functional discovery sessions to establish shared understanding of product goals, user needs, and business constraints, setting clear direction for design execution.

Ideation Sketches

Challenge

Stocktwits is the largest social network for traders and investors. When we launched commission-free trading, the strategic challenge emerged:

“Why would users choose to trade here instead of on their existing brokerage?”

The answer: community. Stocktwits users already generated millions of trading ideas. Our opportunity was to turn those ideas into seamless trade actions — and then transform those trades into content that fuels the next wave of engagement.

Commoditized trading: Commission-free models reduced friction but also erased differentiation.

Emotional journeys: Trading is as emotional as it is analytical. Most platforms offer technical tools, but few offer expressive outlets.

Expression gap: Users either use advanced technical tools (charts, indicators) or casual memes. A hybrid approach could bridge emotional connection and actionable insight.

Industry Insights & User Challenges

A New Kind of Risk: “Unlimited Play”

The rise of zero-commission trading gave beginners unprecedented access — and exposed them to high risk. Many lost money quickly due to impulsive, high-stakes trades, with few safeguards or reflective tools to help them learn.

Talking with traders revealed a deeper truth: trading isn’t just technical — it’s emotionally complex, involving confidence, frustration, pride, doubt, regret, and excitement, often in rapid succession.

Platform Market Research

Mapping Emotional Expression

To address this emotional complexity, I mapped a spectrum of trader emotions along the journey and audited other platforms, revealing two expression styles:

• Technical (e.g., TradingView): precise markups and analysis.

• Casual (e.g., Reddit): memes, light annotations, quick reactions.

Despite their differences, both followed the same loop — discover, create, share — turning trading into a social cycle. This reframed the challenge: give investors tools to express and reflect, not just execute.

Mapping Trader Emotions

Objectives

• Drive trade activity & AUM by making trading socially visible and participatory.

• Turn trades into narratives through expressive content creation tied to trading actions.

• Differentiate the platform with community-first tools for sharing strategies, wins, and lessons.

Trade Schematic & Wireframes

Design Strategy: Creation + Consumption

Core Concept: Every trade tells a story.

Tradecast lets users transform their trades into expressive posts that can be shared publicly or kept privately as a personal journal.

Key Features

• User-Generated Content: Text, drawings, GIFs, or video layered over trade charts.

• Integrated Sharing Tools — Auto-generated P&L cards and trend overlays that can be shared externally.

• Community Engagement: Likes, comments, and follows spark conversations.

• Discoverability: Feeds highlighting trending trades and thought leaders.

Insight: Trading as a Content Loop

• Discover market ideas through feeds and conversations.

• Act on those ideas by trading.

• Create & Share the story behind the trade.

• Consume others’ stories — fueling more discovery.

• Tradecast was designed to close this loop.

Launching Tradecast

• Automatic Trade Snapshots upon execution. When a user executes a trade, a Tradecast is automatically created using a daily chart snapshot as the base canvas.

• Creative Canvas to annotate with text, drawings, or video commentary.

• Public or Private Sharing — post to the feed or journal privately for reflection.

This seamless creation and consumption loop gave users a new way to tell the story of their trades.

Results

📉 Low creation volume: most users added minimal text or annotations.

📈 Strong consumption — engagement on the Tradecast feed met near-target metrics.

🧠 Key insight: Users are eager to consume stories even if they’re less likely to create them at first.

Iteration 2

Enhancing Context & Usability

• Added buy price and real-time P&L for more context.

• Moved creation tools to main navigation to lower friction.

• Linked Tradecasts to stock detail pages to drive trading activity.

Expanding Discovery

• Introduced dedicated Tradecast feeds on stock pages.

• Streamlined navigation from Tradecast to trade actions.

Results

🆙 Increased content creation and expressive annotations.

🚀 Tradecast views surpassed targets across Home and Stock Feeds.

💰 Increased trade conversions from Tradecast interactions.

Final Iteration

Express Every Moment

• GIF Integration (GIPHY) for easy emotional expression.

• Stickers, reaction templates, and sentiment sliders to lower creative barriers.

• View counters & social graphs to deepen community connections.

Trading isn’t just a transaction. It’s a story — and Tradecast turned those moments into conversations.

Designing for behavioral loops rather than isolated features was key — the real power came from the interaction between consuming and creating. Contextual storytelling transformed trading activity into meaningful community engagement, with real trade data grounding every story in authenticity. And because trading is inherently human, emotional UX became essential in a high-stakes financial environment, ensuring the product reflected not just transactions, but the feelings and narratives behind them.

Reflection

• Wins: Made trading more human, more connected, and more discoverable.

• Elevated community engagement, bridged emotional and technical expression, increased trading activity.

• Challenges: Lowering friction for content creation remained key to scaling.

• Impact: Cemented Stocktwits’ position as the leading social trading platform, where ideas, trades, and stories live together.