OANDA — Trade Web — Density that scales with expertise, not a compromise for everyone

Context

One screen, two very different traders

OANDA is a 25+ year forex and CFD broker serving retail and institutional traders who make time-sensitive decisions on live market data.

I worked on the OANDA Trade web platform, where the core design tension is permanent: expert traders want density and speed; newer traders need clarity and confidence — on the same screen.

Challenge

Serve both without compromising either

The platform had to serve both audiences without becoming a compromise that satisfied neither — a dashboard too dense for beginners and too sparse for professionals loses both segments to competitors built for one or the other.

The brief was to redesign the core trading dashboard so information density scaled to user expertise without fragmenting the product into separate apps.

Approach & Process

Density as a setting, not a decision

I segmented research by trading frequency rather than by demographic — day traders, swing traders, and occasional traders think about the same screen completely differently. That led to a progressive-disclosure model: a clean default view for lower-frequency users, with power features (advanced order types, multi-chart layouts) available a layer down rather than always-on.

Every research readout was reduced to a single stat per trader segment, so the case for progressive disclosure was legible to a trading-desk stakeholder in one glance, not twenty.

Impact

Simpler by default, no cost to the pros

New users reached their first trade faster with fewer execution errors, while active traders retained — and in some workflows increased — their session depth, showing the simplified default didn't cost the power users anything. Support volume tied to order-execution confusion fell, directly reducing operational cost.

Learnings & Reflection

Let density be earned progressively

The instinct in trading UI is to design for the loudest, most vocal power users. The bigger unlock here was treating density as a setting, not a fixed design decision — letting expertise reveal itself through use rather than forcing every user through an onboarding quiz to declare it upfront.

Reflection: the best interfaces for expert tools often aren't the densest ones — they're the ones that let density be earned progressively.