Smart Trades: making automation feel effortless

Young Platform's mission has always been to make crypto investing more accessible. As the platform evolved, we saw an opportunity to expand beyond buying and selling by introducing smarter ways for people to invest over time. Smart Trades is an automated investment product that allows users to execute predefined trading strategies through a simple, approachable experience, bringing advanced investing tools to a much broader audience.

Company: Young Platform
Role: Lead Product Designer
Services: UX/UI, Prototyping, Visual Design
Team: Me, 4 Engineers, 1 PM
Year: 2023 Q4 - 2024 Q1

Smart Trades trading-bot screen inside the Young Platform app

Automation for everyday investors

Automation has become a standard expectation across many financial products, yet crypto trading remained largely manual and intimidating. Experienced traders could navigate complex strategies, but everyday investors often lacked the confidence, or the time to do the same. Smart Trades was an opportunity to make automation accessible without making it feel “risky”.

My role

Beyond designing interfaces, my role was to help define how automated investing should work for Young Platform's audience. From product discovery to interaction design, I collaborated with cross-functional teams to create an experience that made automation feel understandable and trustworthy.

Supported crypto assets — Bitcoin, Polkadot, Ethereum

Maximise your investments with strategies

Every Smart Trade is composed of a few simple decisions, allowing users to benefit from automated investing without understanding the underlying trading logic.

How a Smart Trade is composed: strategy, asset, investment, and monitoring

Automation without anxiety

For most people, trading crypto isn't exciting, it's overwhelming. Newcomers often struggled with timing: when to buy, when to sell, and when to wait. Even experienced users felt tied to their screens, afraid of missing out or making the wrong move. Emotions ruled many of these decisions. Fear of loss, the thrill of quick gains, and constant market noise created a cycle of doubt. While automated tools already existed, they were usually hidden behind complex dashboards or explained in language that felt intimidating.

How might we make automated investing feel simple and trustworthy for everyone?

Building for trust and growth

To make automation feel approachable, we focused on three key areas throughout the project.

Discovery

Through user interviews, support tickets, and funnel analysis, we uncovered the main barriers preventing adoption. Users weren't intimidated by automation itself, they feared making costly mistakes, struggled with complex trading tools, and lacked confidence in handing decisions over to a strategy.

Design

We translated technical trading concepts into clear, goal-oriented strategies like Buy the Dip, Range Trade, and Take Profits. Progressive disclosure reduced cognitive load by introducing one decision at a time, while plain language helped users understand outcomes instead of learning trading jargon.

Delivery

Working closely with Engineering, we iterated quickly while extending the existing design system with new components, interaction patterns, and strategy cards. Every flow was designed to feel guided, transparent, and easy to revisit as users became more confident.

Our guiding principle was simple: make automation feel human, transparent, and trustworthy.

BTC / Kelter Channel strategy detail screen

Strategy outcomes compared against buy and hold

Setting up a Smart Trade — amount, currency, and balance

The Trading Bot dashboard with an active strategy, in hand

Strategy performance chart with buy signals

BTC / Kelter Channel overview with balance and performance

Measurable growth through user trust

Smart Trades quickly became one of Young Platform's most adopted product launches. Beyond driving measurable business growth, it introduced a new way for users to approach investing, one that reduced friction, increased confidence, and encouraged long-term engagement. In the first period of 3 months we got:

Increase in trade volume: 0K+
Unique users engaged: 0K+
Capital allocated: 0K+
Growth in Club subscriptions: 0%

Summary

What Smart Trades changed for me was how I think about complexity. At first, the challenge looked technical: how do we make automated strategies easier to understand? But the more we worked on it, the clearer it became that the real barrier was confidence. People didn’t need more controls, they needed to understand what was happening and feel comfortable enough to act. That shifted the way I approached the product. Instead of trying to simplify everything, I focused more on making the important parts visible at the right moment. And this is something I still carry into my work today.

Hey there, I’m Federico