Robinhood's 24 Hour Market
Navigating compliance, conceptual density, and content systems to help customers trade on their own terms.
Customers locked out of their own market
Years of research and support tickets told us the same story. Robinhood customers were eager to participate in the stock market but couldn't always do so because they had jobs during market hours, cared for families, or were otherwise unavailable. The opportunity to make extended-hours trading accessible to a general audience was significant.
I ran a journey mapping workshop with my product designer, researcher, PM, and legal and compliance partners to figure out how the 24 Hour Market would take shape within Robinhood's existing trading experiences.
One key takeaway was that we'd build on top of Robinhood's existing limit order flow for the core functionality.
The natural pricing rabbit hole
The existing limit order experience was already cumbersome and informationally dense, especially for people new to trading. As I started reviewing the content across these surfaces, I found myself staring at a market price tooltip reading, "The consolidated real-time market data for PINS across all US stock exchanges is..." followed by cryptic data and a hefty disclaimer.
My hunch was that this content wasn't great. But a hunch isn't a critique. So I went looking for the root cause.
Tracing the content back to our design system, I found the definitional header pattern that likely produced it. Reasonable pattern, reasonable output, until you factor in compliance.
After meeting with our legal and compliance partners, I learned that this content had been shaped by a tug-of-war between our plain-language pattern and the SEC's Regulation Best Interest. Terms like "contextual information" and "no misleading statements" had pushed the content toward a clunky but defensible phrase. Understanding this root cause didn't make the content good, but it made the problem solvable.
The data that justified going deeper
My research and analytics partners helped quantify the problem. Over the previous 12 months, customers who tapped the market price tooltip had a 7% increase in bounces, and those who didn't bounce were 12% more likely to abandon the trade flow entirely.
My hypothesis: there was a mismatch between what customers expected (learning about market price) and what they got (specific market data about the bid/ask spread with no indication of how the two concepts related).
This wasn't strictly within the scope of 24 Hour Market. It would require changes to the existing limit order flow, all of which had already received legal and compliance approval. But the potential to reduce bounce and abandonment across all limit orders, not just 24HM, made it worth escalating.
Designing for clarity in a dense space
My early explorations moved away from the "natural pricing" scheme toward showing the bid/ask spread directly. The goal was to convey this information to a customer on the go, without overwhelming, annoying, or misinforming them.
The core message was that your limit price impacts whether your order executes, and this market data can help you set an intentional price.
As we added educational content to the modal, density multiplied. We had to ask ourselves what the responsibility of this experience really was. How much educating can we expect a limit order flow to do?
We agreed on enough to limit risk, enable action, and inspire more experimentation.
Education vs. recommendation
We designed an onboarding tour to introduce the bid/ask spread data, with tooltips walking through bid price, ask price, lot size, and how to use the data. We used card sorting tests with look-alike users to determine the sequence.
The compliance line here is the distinction between education and recommendation. "Consider selling" is directive. Under Reg BI, anything resembling a recommendation triggers best-interest obligations. The approved version is purely definitional. From a content design perspective, it's beautifully neutral. It lets the user make their own informed decision.
In regulated fintech, one of our jobs is to make users capable of good decisions, not to make decisions for them.
Tone as substance and sound
I think of tone as two elements: substance (what we say and its conceptual impact) and sound (how units of language actually feel). When these come together, we can modulate tone to complement and empower our content.
A term of art like execute, which is full of glottal stops, conceptually dense, and associated with unpleasant things, might seem like it doesn't belong in a friendly trading app. But customers need to understand what it means to navigate equities trading. My rationale was that the domain expertise it imparts outweighs the friction. Sometimes a hard word earns its place.
What shipped
The V1 flow shipped with a discovery card, the revised limit order experience, bid/ask spread data, and the onboarding tour. I also served as co-implementation lead on Robinhood's content committee, which meant everything we learned from 24 Hour Market (patterns for displaying market data, guidance on future tenses, when to use natural pricing vs. bid/ask spread, and approved terms of art) got codified as standards and guidelines for the broader team.