Developing a Trading App in a Live Environment
Trading App
Overview
Our Client
Active across the United States, Canada, and globally, this online brokerage firm provides a comprehensive trading platform, offering commission-free trading capabilities. Users can conveniently trade and track stocks from any device while enjoying real-time data flow and direct access to the stock market.
Our Mandate
nventive was tasked with the development of a new cross-platform app to replace its previous mobile application. This new app required an exceptional level of performance to support data updating in real time for its users.
Our Realizations
- User experience
- User interface
- Front-end development
- Front-end quality assurance
Technologies
- Multi-platform application logic: C# and .Net
- Multi-Platform UI: Uno.UI, Uno.material
- Mobile feature abstractions: Uno.UI & Xamarin.Essentials
Collaborate to Create
Over the course of several months, our teams worked closely together, breathing life into the project.
Our collaboration gave way to a series of fruitful initiatives, such as daily stand-ups by videoconference, ongoing discussions with their internal team of developers, meticulous documentation of technical meetings and business requirements, bi-weekly sprint reviews, and ongoing feedback from the client using the AGILE method. By following industry best practices, our teams ensured the project's resounding success.
The Developped Digital Solution
The mobile app is built for traders on-the-go, combining the best features of previous iterations in a user-friendly, upgraded mobile interface. With our solution, users can enjoy round-the-clock access to their trading accounts, leveraging real-time streaming data, advanced charts, efficient order entry, and comprehensive portfolio management tools. The app empowers short sellers by enabling them to effortlessly search and locate hard-to-borrow stocks, while also providing the option to sell back any unutilized locates.
The cross-platform app consolidates various functions designed to enhance its utility for day traders:
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Shows live data: On a single screen, users can visualize the evolution, volume, or change percentage for each stock based on precise selectable filters. When users scroll down in the app, a fixed header allows them to keep the presented data in mind.
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Gives access to news: Day traders can access up-to-date news about each stock to learn more about the respective companies.
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Provides analytical charts: To make informed decisions, users can access the stock market’s past chart data (day, week, month, year). They can choose the type of chart that is most suited for their analytical needs.
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Creates customized lists: To streamline the trading process, our teams developed watch lists, allowing day traders to conveniently monitor multiple stocks simultaneously.
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Showcases portfolios: Day traders can quickly visualize their portfolios, gaining instant access to comprehensive information about their holdings, facilitating informed decision-making.
Main Challenges We Overcame
Learning The Trade
Our experts involved on the project, including UX/UI specialists, developers, and testers, eagerly expanded their knowledge of stock trading to gain a better understanding of the client's requirements and user expectations.
To do so, our teams underwent comprehensive internal training on various aspects of trading theory, including essential indicators, market dynamics, and hard-to-borrow stocks. This enhanced expertise played a crucial role in delivering a digital solution that perfectly aligned with the users' needs.
«Understanding the advanced concepts of trading and parameters required for the transactions was a big challenge, which was both rewarding and essential to support the team and the client in defining business needs for the platform. I think the app is well suited to the day traders’ mobility needs and that it consists in an important step in the overall user experience offered to their clients.»
Gabrielle Garand
Manager, Product owner
Testing the Live Data Environment
To accelerate the development of the cross-platform app and ensure autonomy, our teams used data mocking. This approach facilitated the seamless integration of user experience and user interface elements, while effectively addressing any bugs that may have come from front-end development.
Jean-Philippe Levesque, Team lead and developer, tells us more about data mocking: “Using data mocking enabled us to build a stable development environment. Doing so is ideal for the implementation process for user experience, certain business rules, and user interface. Naturally, test data simplifies the task of writing advanced automated tests. We can simulate complex scenarios instead of merely limiting ourselves to unit tests.”
Guaranteeing Constant Performance in a Live Environment
Given the dynamic nature of the stock market, it was imperative for the trading app to update metrics multiple times per second, ensuring users received accurate information.
To meet this requirement, our teams conducted a performance analysis to compile and apply various optimizations, for example, updating only the visible data on a screen or deactivating invisible pages to enhance overall performance.
«When we started to integrate live updates and metrics at the start of the project, we realized these elements caused important performance issues. It got to a point where the Android version could simply not work properly. The adjustments we applied allowed us not only to fix the Android version with the metrics, but also to deliver a high-quality product,»
Kevin Takla
Project lead and developer
Conclusion
Our teams consistently demonstrated adaptability and a deep understanding of the challenges involved in developing a cross-platform app that fully caters to the needs of day traders. Vincent Castagna, developer, tells us more: “Learning the trader’s language to translate it into the best technical solution possible allowed us to truly follow the completion for every essential feature before the start of production for the final users.” This approach led us to successfully deliver a comprehensive solution aligned with the traders' requirements and expectations.
