Robinhood
As a product designer on Robinhood's active-trader push, I worked on three tools for its fastest traders: AI that reads the market for you, keyboard-speed execution and a pro options ladder.
Shipped · Product design · Vibe coding
The problem
The fastest traders needed a tool Robinhood didn't have yet.
Robinhood made its name on a calm, tap-to-trade app for first-timers. But its most active traders had outgrown it. They needed to act in seconds, and were leaving for clunky professional platforms instead. The answer: Robinhood Legend, a desktop platform for serious traders, plus pro tools on mobile. Real professional power, without losing the clarity Robinhood is known for.
Understanding the user
Designing for the most time-pressured trader there is.
Some people buy and sell within seconds, hundreds of times a day. They're called scalpers, the most time-pressured users in trading. A one-second delay can erase the profit. I made them my anchor: get the hard parts right for them, without pushing their complexity onto everyone else.
"By the time I tap through the order screen, the move I wanted is already gone."
The scalper
Qualities
Insight:
Know what's moving in seconds
Speed:
In and out in one action
Precision:
Adjust a live trade by price
The first need · Insight
Profit & Loss (vIbe-coded) Dashboard
Some designs you can only judge by using them. A profit and loss tool is one of them. So I prototyped it in code, leaning on AI to move fast, and turned a flat concept into something you could actually click through. Seeing it live surfaced issues a static mockup would have hidden, and gave the team a real thing to align around before engineering started.
More insight
Cortex Digests: reading the move in seconds.
Speed and precision are wasted if you don't know what's happening. Digests use AI to turn market data and news into a short, plain-language read on what's driving a stock right now. No jargon, no noise. The challenge was trust and restraint: confident and scannable, clearly information rather than advice. Of users surveyed, 95% said they loved it.
The first need: Speed
Hotkeys: trading at the speed of a keystroke.
For these traders, the bottleneck isn't the market, it's the app. Hotkeys let them place and manage trades with single keystrokes, so the action keeps pace with the decision. The hard part was making one-keystroke trading safe: off by default, a clear live state, and a single panic key that cancels everything. Fast, but never reckless.
The third need · Precision
Options Ladder: managing the live position by price.
Once in, traders manage by price, not by filling out forms. The ladder is the pro tool for this: a column of prices where every row is one tap to act on. The catch: it's unfamiliar to most of Robinhood's users. My job was to make a dense, expert tool feel clear and unmistakably Robinhood: obvious buy and sell sides, drag to set your price, profit and loss live on screen.
Impact
