Case Study · 06 of 06

FXGiants: an onboarding dashboard for new retail traders.

A multi-surface trader dashboard designed to walk new clients from sign-up to first trade. Built around the three jobs they actually have to complete: open an account, fund it, start trading — without losing them in between.

Role
Lead Product Designer
Timeline
5 months · 2024
Team
1 designer + me, 4 engineers, 1 PM, Compliance
Platform
Web · iPad · iOS
FXGiants trader dashboard across desktop, iPad and iPhone

Most retail traders never make their first trade.

FXGiants serves retail forex and CFD traders. New clients arrived motivated and often left before placing a single order — stuck somewhere between account opening, funding, and the actual trading terminal.

I led the redesign of the new-client dashboard: the screen people see between signing up and trading. The brief was to convert sign-ups into funded, trading accounts. Everything we did was measured against that single funnel.

Where new traders fall off.

We instrumented the funnel and watched 90 days of new-client behaviour. The dashboard wasn't bad — it was just passive. Users landed, looked around, and left without completing the next step. Nothing pulled them forward.

Finding 01

Sign-up is the easy part.

Account opening completion was 78%. Funding completion dropped to 41%. First trade was 24%. The dashboard sat right in the middle of those drop-offs.

Finding 02

Users want the next action, not the full menu.

Showing all wallets, all promotions, all options at once felt overwhelming. Users wanted: "what should I do next?"

Finding 03

Trust drops at the funding step.

Users hesitated to deposit before they'd confirmed the platform was real. We added social proof and platform-stability cues to the funding screen.

Finding 04

Mobile is for checking, not for committing.

Funding and KYC mostly happen on desktop or tablet. Mobile is for "is my account ready yet?" — a one-glance check.

A dashboard with one job at a time.

We turned the dashboard into a guided sequence. At any moment, the user sees their next single action at the top of the screen, with the full menu still available below for power users. The next action updates automatically as steps complete.

What we shipped

  • "How to start" hero block — a three-step progressive checklist (Open account → Deposit → Trade) that lives above the fold and tracks real status from the backend.
  • Contextual deposit experience — funding methods filtered by region, with logos and short trust statements next to each, plus an instant fee preview before commit.
  • Wallet strip — multi-currency wallets surfaced as horizontal cards, each with quick actions (deposit, withdraw, transfer) reachable in one tap.
  • Bonus & promotion cards — opt-in only, with clear T&Cs and the maths spelled out. Designed with Compliance from day one.
  • Responsive across desktop, iPad and phone — same component system, three densities. Phone shows status + a single CTA. iPad mirrors desktop in a portrait layout.
"First time I've felt the dashboard was actually trying to help me, not just show me everything at once." — New client, week 1, in a moderated test session

The dashboard, across devices.

Real money moved sooner.

+38%
Daily active users in the first 30 days post-signup
+27%
Funding completion rate vs. previous dashboard
-44%
Order-entry errors among first-month traders
4.8★
App store rating, post-launch

What I'd carry into the next trader product.

Trading UI is risk UI. Even a "marketing" dashboard for new traders is a regulated surface. Every promotion, every bonus, every CTA gets reviewed by Compliance. Pulling them into the design loop early saved weeks of rework.

Default to one action. The temptation in dashboards is to surface options. The right move in onboarding is to surface the option, and let users find the rest if they want it.

Match density to device. Desktop traders want everything on screen. Mobile traders want a glance. Building the same content at three densities — with the design system to back it — was more useful than three bespoke layouts would have been.

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