Robinhood
As a product designer on Robinhood's active-trader push, I worked on four tools for its fastest traders: AI-powered market briefings, keyboard-speed execution, a pro options ladder, and a profit & loss analysis tool.
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: Market 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.
More insight · Performance
Performance Analysis System
Traders lacked one trusted view of their performance outcomes. I designed the place they go after the trade, on both mobile and desktop: a full view to see realized results, dig into individual trades, and understand which strategies are working. On Legend, the desktop platform, that came with Cortex, Robinhood's AI agent, layered in so a trader can just ask a question and watch the dashboard filter, group, and break it down to answer. I prototyped it in code rather than static mockups, since a tool like this you can only really judge by clicking through it.
It started on mobile, as a way to see your performance
The first version lived on mobile, where most traders check in. It focused on the core need: see your realized results over time, open up a trade, understand a good or bad stretch. Clean, glanceable, built for a phone.
Then desktop, Cortex came with the room to think
On Legend's desktop platform, the same P&L data had space to become something you could interrogate. That's where Cortex fits: with a full screen and an active-trader workflow, a trader can ask a question and watch the dashboard filter, group, and break down to answer it. The agentic layer earned its place on desktop, not on the phone.
Prototyped in code
I built this as a working prototype in code, using React and Cursor with AI assistance, so the team could click through the real interaction instead of imagining it from flat screens. See the live prototype →
Initial prototype exploration in cursor + claude code
Final solution
The second 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.
The third 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.
Impact
