Farlo — Designing a Seamless Trading Experience
Overview
I led the end-to-end redesign, simplifying complex workflows and creating a more intuitive, engaging, and accessible experience that improved user adoption, retention, and overall product usability.
Services
Product design
Overview
Financial products have a reputation for being complicated. From trading platforms filled with charts and numbers to investment apps with multiple account types and confusing financial terminology, users are often expected to understand the system before they can confidently use it. When I started working on Farlo, I saw an opportunity to approach the problem differently. Rather than simply designing another trading platform, I wanted to help create an experience where trading, investing, and managing money could feel like one connected journey.
Farlo is a financial platform built around giving users access to global markets while also allowing them to invest, manage their money, and move funds within one ecosystem. The challenge was taking all of these capabilities and turning them into an experience that felt intuitive, trustworthy, and easy to navigate. My role as a Product Designer was focused on simplifying these experiences through clearer information architecture, thoughtful user flows, intuitive interfaces, and a consistent visual system.
The Problem
The first thing that stood out to me was how fragmented the traditional financial experience can feel. A user might have one application for trading, another for investing, another for managing currencies, and yet another for moving money. Even when these products offer great functionality individually, users are forced to constantly switch between different experiences and mental models.
Farlo was trying to solve a much bigger problem than simply giving people access to financial markets. The opportunity was to bring these activities together and make them feel connected. But that introduced another challenge: how do you create a product with a lot of functionality without making it feel complicated? That became the central question that guided my design process.
Understanding the User Journey
Instead of looking at each Farlo feature as an isolated experience, I started looking at the entire journey a user might take with their money. Someone might start by creating an account, fund their wallet, explore an asset, make a trade, invest in a stock, and eventually move their money somewhere else. Although these are technically different actions, they all belong to the same financial journey.
This changed how I approached the experience. I wasn’t just designing a trading screen or an investment dashboard; I was designing the transitions between these experiences. I wanted users to move from one part of Farlo to another without feeling like they had entered a completely different product. The interface needed to make those transitions feel natural, predictable, and connected.
Listening to Users — and to the Data
I started by grounding ourselves in evidence. Quantitative analysis showed that users with three or more downloaded playlists revisited those playlists far less after updates, a 14% drop compared to playlists that hadn’t changed. Save rates for newly added tracks were consistently low, not because users disliked them, but because they didn’t know they existed.
Qualitative research added emotional context. In interviews and diary studies, users described downloads as a promise. When content disappeared without explanation, it felt like Spotify had broken that promise. Importantly, users didn’t ask for fewer changes, they asked for fewer surprises.
Turning Complexity Into Clarity
One of the biggest challenges in designing for trading is information density. Financial products naturally contain a lot of data, and much of it is important. Prices change constantly, markets move, balances need to be visible, and users need enough information to make informed decisions. The problem is that showing everything at once can quickly overwhelm the user.
My approach was to focus on hierarchy rather than simply reducing information. Instead of asking what information could be removed, I asked what information the user needed at that specific moment. Primary information received more visual emphasis, while secondary information was positioned where users could access it when needed. This allowed the interface to remain informative without becoming visually overwhelming.
The goal wasn’t to hide the complexity of trading. It was to make that complexity easier to understand.
Designing the Trading Experience
Trading is fundamentally a decision-making experience. A user needs to understand what they’re trading, how much they’re committing, what the current market looks like, and what will happen when they execute an order. Every one of those decisions introduces an opportunity for confusion.
I approached the trading experience by creating a stronger relationship between the asset information, the user’s position, and the action they were about to take. Rather than treating charts, numbers, controls, and actions as separate interface elements, I designed them as parts of the same decision-making process. The experience should help the user move from understanding an opportunity to taking action without unnecessary friction.
This was particularly important because Farlo needed to work for both experienced traders who value speed and control and newer users who may not immediately understand every trading concept. The interface therefore had to feel powerful without becoming intimidating.
Making the Wallet More Than a Balance
As I explored the broader Farlo experience, it became clear that the wallet could play a much bigger role than simply displaying how much money a user had. It could become the connection between the different things users wanted to do with their money.
A user might deposit funds into Farlo, move money into their trading account, invest part of their balance, withdraw funds, or manage different currencies. These actions are technically different, but from the user’s perspective, they’re all simply different ways of managing their money. Designing around this mental model helped create a more cohesive experience where the wallet became a bridge between trading, investing, and other financial activities.
This was one of the most important shifts in my thinking during the project: the product architecture should support the user’s mental model, not force the user to understand how the platform is structured.
Expanding From Trading Into Investing
Farlo wasn’t limited to active trading. The platform also introduced an investing experience where users could access U.S. stocks, ETFs, and fractional shares. This presented an interesting design challenge because trading and investing involve very different user behaviours.
Trading is generally more immediate and action-oriented, while investing requires users to think about ownership, performance, diversification, and longer-term goals. I therefore approached the investment experience with a different information hierarchy while still maintaining the same overall product language. Users needed to understand what they were investing in, how their portfolio was performing, and how individual assets contributed to their overall position.
The experience still felt like Farlo, but the interface adapted to the different mindset required for investing.
Designing for Trust
Designing a financial product also meant thinking deeply about trust. When someone is interacting with an e-commerce product, a confusing interaction might be frustrating. When that same confusion involves someone’s money, the consequences are much greater.
I therefore treated clarity as a fundamental part of the product experience. When users were moving money, the interface needed to make the destination and action clear. When they were making a trade, they needed to understand what they were confirming. When an action succeeded or failed, the system needed to provide immediate and meaningful feedback.
These details may appear small individually, but together they create an experience where users feel that the product is predictable and that they remain in control of their money.
Creating a Consistent Design System
As the product grew, consistency became increasingly important. Trading, investing, wallets, payments, and account management could easily develop their own visual patterns if they were designed independently. That would make the overall product feel fragmented even if the underlying experience was connected.
I focused on creating reusable patterns across the product, from navigation and buttons to cards, forms, financial data, transaction states, and feedback patterns. The goal was to make every interaction feel familiar regardless of which part of Farlo the user was currently using.
This wasn’t just about visual consistency. A consistent design system also reduced the amount of thinking required from users. Once someone understands how one part of the product behaves, they can carry that understanding into another part of the experience.
The Design Philosophy
Throughout the project, I kept coming back to one principle: the user shouldn’t have to understand how Farlo works in order to use Farlo. They shouldn’t need to understand the underlying architecture, the different wallets, or how the financial products connect before they can accomplish a task.
That meant designing around intent rather than features. Instead of asking, “How do we expose everything the platform can do?”, I focused on questions like, “What is the user trying to accomplish?” and “What information do they need to confidently make that decision?”
This helped shape an experience that felt less like navigating a collection of financial tools and more like interacting with one connected financial platform.
The Outcome
The result was a product experience designed to bring different financial activities into a single, coherent ecosystem. Trading, investing, and money management could exist within the same environment without forcing users to constantly switch between disconnected experiences.
More importantly, the work reinforced the idea that simplicity in fintech doesn’t necessarily mean showing less information. It means showing the right information at the right time, creating clear relationships between actions and outcomes, and making users feel confident about the decisions they’re making.
Farlo ultimately became an exercise in reducing friction across a traditionally complex category. Rather than trying to make trading look simple, the goal was to make the experience itself feel simple
What I Learned
Farlo changed the way I think about designing financial products. Before this project, I might have looked at a trading interface primarily as a collection of charts, numbers, controls, and dashboards. Working through the product made me realize that the real challenge is much more human: how do you make someone feel confident when they’re making decisions about their money?
That question influenced almost every design decision I made. It affected how information was prioritized, how actions were structured, how feedback was communicated, and how different parts of the product were connected.
The biggest lesson I took away was that good fintech design isn’t about removing complexity. It’s about taking complexity that naturally exists in finance and translating it into an experience that people can understand, navigate, and ultimately trust.
For Farlo, the goal was simple: make trading feel less like work and more like a seamless part of managing your financial life.
