Fintech — demo trading platform with gamified tournaments · 2024
MerriTrade
Designing the recurring engagement loop for a demo trading platform with real-prize tournaments.
- Client
- Stradex Vietnam (owned product)
- Role
- UI/UX Designer
- Outcome
- 17,000 subscribed users · 96% tournament completion rate
Context
MerriTrade is a demo trading platform: users practice trading across stocks, crypto, forex, and NFTs with virtual capital, then compete in tournaments for real prizes. The platform is mobile + web and was particularly focused on the Vietnamese trader market, with an educational emphasis through resources and tools that help users develop trading techniques.
I joined Stradex as the youngest member of a five-person Product team and owned UI/UX end-to-end across the product. The four other team members each acted as Product Manager for a product in the portfolio; I reported to whichever PM was leading the project I was on. There was no in-house BA and no in-house engineering — development was outsourced to external partner companies, so design handoff went out to outsourced dev teams.
Problem
MerriTrade's whole proposition rests on one thing: a contest UX that users actually finish. Demo trading on its own is unremarkable. Tournaments with real prizes only matter if users complete them — and the original platform was a hand-me-down with screens that prioritised feature surface over the engagement loop.
Insight
Demo trading plus real prizes only works if users finish what they start.
That reframed the work. Instead of optimising individual screens, I proposed organising the whole product around the recurring engagement loop: tournament browsing → tournament detail → registration → live participation → leaderboard and results → next tournament.
Decisions
Tournament journey as the engagement spine
Designed every screen along the contest path to pull users toward the next contest — five-screen sequence from browsing through to leaderboard. Multiple tournament formats supported (individual, team, segmented by asset category) so users have a reason to return for different competition shapes.
More surfaces to maintain than a single contest format, but format variety is what produced the recurrence.
Live trading screen — keep dense data learnable
The hardest UX problem of the project. Real-time candlestick chart, order entry, position state, and tournament context all on one screen, kept learnable for users new to trading. Tight composition of dense information without overwhelming users who are practising precisely because they're new.
A more sophisticated visual hierarchy than a typical trading screen, with stricter rules about when to surface tournament context. Worth it because hiding tournament state on the live screen would have broken the engagement loop.
Tokens that hook back into the loop
An in-platform token economy: tokens earned through successful trades and contest participation, redeemable for rewards or entry into higher-tier tournaments. Designed quest and mission flows so token earning feels like progression rather than grind.
More mechanics for the user to learn upfront, but the redemption-to-tournament hook is what makes tokens feel like fuel rather than points.
Step 01
Trade activity
Practice trading + tournament participation generates the activity that mints tokens.
Step 02
Earn tokens
Successful trades and contest entries credit tokens to the user — quest framing keeps it from feeling repetitive.
Step 04
Re-engage
New tournament unlocked → new round of trade activity. The loop closes back to step 01.
Step 03
Tournament entry · Rewards
Tokens redeem for higher-tier tournament entries or direct rewards. Tokens act like fuel, not points.
Execution
I owned UI/UX end-to-end across the consumer-facing platform on mobile and web — designing the trading contest interface (registration, browsing, detail, leaderboard, prize/result screens), the live trading screen, the tokens earning system, and a dedicated MerriTrade design system in Figma. Validation ran through internal company-wide play-testing tournaments — using Stradex employees as tournament participants in real conditions to surface usability issues before public release.
Outcome
The 96% number is worth being precise about: it measures actual completion — among users who signed up for a tournament, 96% played through to the end, not just registered. That signal matters more than registration counts because it's the part of the funnel that actually produces engagement. MerriTrade remained one of Stradex's flagship owned products through the rest of my tenure.