Hi Jani, thanks for your reply giving the context behind why the system currently works as it does.
I don’t know if you’ve seen it (as you don’t refer to it) but there is another topic where a poll as been posted asking how many times people have accidentally placed an instant order when they didn’t mean to.
At time of writing, 35% of respondants have done so at least once. This is over a third and seems very high, especially considering that so far the majority of Freetrade users should be relatively savvy about these things, being early adopters (and investors). This is a group of people who are almost primed to blame themselves for getting something wrong and to not bother contacting support.
I strongly suspect that, following a wider roll-out, people who are not so strongly predisposed to support Freetrade will be much quicker to complain. And, to extrapolate from the poll, having a third of your customers complaining (or being in a position to complain) would be pretty huge.
The tl;dr for the above would be, at this point in Freetrade’s journey, lack of complaints isn’t the best of defences.
I’ve thought about this a lot since I got caught out, and it seems to me that there are, broadly speaking, three points of view.
- Freetrade, who want to make the instant option visible.
- Normal users, who expect a trade on Freetrade to be, well, free.
- Power users, who want their order to be instant and instant.
I think there is a way of acceptably satisfying all three sides, if it’s possible to built it in the app:
- For a user’s first ever trade, don’t default to instant. And don’t default to free, either. Make them choose. If they don’t choose and try to continue, have another screen in the flow where you explicitly ask them if they want to queue a free transfer or pay for an instant transfer.
- On this screen, also have a “remember my preference” option.
- (Also allow this to be toggled later through going to the user profile)
This satisfied all three parties to most degrees:
- By forcing a choice, Freetrade make both the free and paid for options visible.
- Normal users cannot mistakenly pay more than they intended to if they move through the flow too quickly - as can and does happen at current.
- Power users have a slight delay on their very first trade, granted. But after than they have the default they want and they’re not disadvantaged.
That’s the possible way I see of making everyone happy, more or less. It does disadvantage power users slightly on their first order, but this to me would be more acceptable than taking money from people who don’t intend to spend it. And also, from my point of view, even the power-est of power users should be account for learning how a new system works the first time around and not be expecting it to be 100% instant right from the off.