Same feature, different thinking.
What does Buy the Dip look like when it's built for confidence, not speed?
Mudrex is one of India's leading crypto investment platforms with 2M+ users and 400K monthly active investors, built around a simple idea: that the complexity behind crypto shouldn't be the investor's problem. The platform serves a broad range of users, with a strong focus on retail investors who are used to straightforward, predictable investment products.
Context
In 2023, the crypto market was in a prolonged downturn. For Mudrex, the priority shifted toward keeping users engaged and giving them reasons to invest with confidence rather than step away. Buy the Dip had been one of the most requested features from users, and it became part of a broader push to build tools that helped people invest more informed. The brief was straightforward: build something that lets users act on price dips. What it required was thinking carefully about whether users had enough information to act on at all. The feature shipped and immediately opened a product direction, directly leading to price alerts, stop loss, and take profit.
My Role
I led design and strategy for Mudrex's Investment Products and Engagement pod, with shared responsibility on the product side as well, including designing for A/B frameworks, reading usage patterns, and deriving insights from data. For this project, I worked in a focused 2-week sprint alongside Shiksha Singh, Senior PM, and the engineering team.
Outcomes
Before designing anything, I needed to understand the mental model behind the decision. I spoke with colleagues across varying investment backgrounds, from people who invest regularly in mutual funds to those who had never touched crypto, to understand how they thought about BTD, what their hesitations were, and why some had never felt the need to use it at all. Alongside that, I went through user requests with the support team. A pattern kept coming up: people wanted the opportunity to come to them, not the other way around.
Comfortable waiting. Willing to lock funds for an unknown duration. Trusts the market will rebound over time.
The Patient Holder
Strongly believes in long-term investing
Has done their homework on specific assets. Uses BTD deliberately, not impulsively. Values signal over noise.
The Informed Researcher
Invests with conviction, not impulse
Comfortable with volatility. Accepts short-term losses as part of a longer bet. Moves fast when they see opportunity.
The Optimistic Risk-Taker
Bets on recovery, accepts the ride
India ranked first in grassroots crypto adoption globally in 2023, across 154 countries. The market was there. The tools hadn't caught up.
Of crypto investors in India were holding long term. Not trading. Waiting. BTD had to be designed for that person.
Three different investor types. Three different relationships with risk. But the same hesitation kept coming up across all of them: not whether to invest in crypto, but whether this particular asset, at this particular moment, was worth acting on. That question had no good answer inside the product.
A lower price feels like a good reason to buy. Without knowing whether the asset is fundamentally strong, users are making high-stakes decisions on a single data point.
Some dips keep dipping. A weak asset doesn't recover just because a user bought it at a discount. The probability of continued loss is real and rarely communicated.
Waiting for the right price creates ongoing stress. Users second-guess their trigger, wonder if they should have gone lower, and often abandon the order mid-wait.
Funds locked waiting for a trigger can't be used elsewhere. If the price never hits, the user loses both time and flexibility and gains nothing.
The job wasn't to stop users from buying the dip. It was to make sure they were doing it for the right reasons, with the right information, and with a safety net if things went wrong.
I looked at how Vauld, Coinbase, Zerodha, and Binance handle BTD-style features. All four help users execute the strategy. None of them help users evaluate whether they should.
Vauld
What works
Simple, low-friction setup. All order management in one place. Frequency controls are a thoughtful addition for repeat dip buyers.
What's missing
No confirmation step. No asset quality signal. No suggestions to help users decide if the dip is worth buying. Built for speed, not confidence.
Coinbase
What works
Real-time price shown during input. Trigger price expressed as a percentage change, which is more intuitive. Amount suggestions reduce decision friction.
What's missing
Fees only appear at the very end of the flow. No insight into whether the asset is a reasonable BTD candidate. The input field swap is counterintuitive for new users.
Zerodha
What works
Dense, useful listing page. Active and paused states well communicated. Real-time price data and percentage representation of trigger price.
What's missing
No onboarding or explanation of how GTT works. Built entirely for active traders. Not retail investors taking their first bet on a dip. Assumes too much prior knowledge.
Binance
What works
Real-time buy and sell prices shown together. Open orders visible at a glance. Input field interaction is fluid and the available balance is always surfaced. Transparent fee display.
What's missing
No explanation of Iceberg orders for new users. Value is not shown in percentage terms, making it harder to contextualise the dip. The interface is overwhelming for a retail investor who just wants to set a simple price target.
Coinbase surfaced price history but assumed the user already had conviction. Zerodha gave data but expected fluency. Binance optimised for speed. None of them designed for the moment just before the decision, when a user knows what they want but not whether now is the right time to want it. That gap was the brief. And because those problems were already solved for elsewhere, there was more room to focus on what none of them had addressed: the emotional layer around the decision itself.
Synthesis
Competitor analysis gave me a direction. But direction wasn't enough. Before touching a single screen, I needed to understand what was actually happening at each stage of the BTD journey, not just what the user was doing, but what they were thinking, what they needed from Mudrex, and where things could go wrong. So I mapped it. Five layers across every stage of the journey. It wasn't a deliverable. It was a way of seeing.
Intent framework mapping user actions, Mudrex responsibilities, ideation and edge cases across BTD Discovery, Placing Order and Order Execution phases.
The pattern
Reading down the columns showed a feature flow. Reading across the INTENT row showed something else. At every meaningful stage, the same question kept surfacing. Not about the product. About whether the user trusted themselves to act.
That wasn't in the brief. It wasn't in the competitor screens. It only became visible when all the dots were connected.
The framework surfaced four distinct gaps. Each one led to multiple explorations. These are the concepts that made the cut.
Users were setting a trigger price with no signal of whether that price was realistic. They were buying blind. A lower price felt like a reason to act, not a reason to pause and ask whether the asset had ever traded near that level before.
Before placing an order, the user sees a quiet signal: how often has this asset historically reached that target? Closes the blind entry gap without adding friction to the flow.
Reading across the entire intent row, one theme kept surfacing. Users wanted to know if they were alone in their decision. Not to follow the crowd. To feel anchored. That question had no answer in the product.
A subtle indicator of how many other Mudrex users have a BTD order on the same asset. Not a crowd-following mechanism. A quiet confidence anchor at the moment the user needs it most.
The anxiety doesn't peak at confirm. It lives in the wait. Funds are locked. The trigger might never hit. The user has no visibility, no control, no signal that anything is happening.
Locked funds made visible. One-tap edit or cancel. A persistent signal the order is active. Designed for the wait, not just the placement.
After execution the user is exposed. The order filled but the asset might keep falling. The edge cases row flagged continued price decline as a real risk. Nobody had designed a response to that moment.
A quiet nudge after execution, not an alarm. A safety net offered at exactly the right moment. The user can set it or skip it. But now they know it exists.
A handful of screens from the shipped product. The full BTD experience covered more ground, edit flows, error states, expired orders, notifications, but these ten are where the framework and the concepts landed most visibly. Enough to picture how it came together.
No single decision produced these. Each number traces back to a specific constraint taken seriously.
Showed intent to invest
Of users who viewed BTD went on to explore it further, signalling genuine intent rather than passive browsing.
Of invested users tried BTD
Within the first 3 months of launch, over half of invested users placed a Buy the Dip order.
Most common user response
Users reported feeling confident, not just capable, when using the feature. That distinction was the whole point.
Features unlocked
BTD's success directly opened the product direction for price alerts, stop loss, and take profit.
The PM asked for a feature. What the research revealed was a confidence problem nobody had named. Users weren't hesitating because they didn't understand crypto. They were hesitating because the product gave them a price and expected them to know what to do with it. The brief was to build a trigger. The actual work was figuring out what a user needs to feel before they pull it. That gap between what was asked and what was needed is where the real design work lives, and I'd push for the space to find it on every project.
The intent framework was not a deliverable. It was a way of seeing. Mapping user intent across three stages before touching a single screen meant every design decision had a question it was answering. It also meant the competitor analysis did real work. Coinbase, Zerodha, and Binance had already solved some of the core UX problems around price display and order placement. Knowing that early freed up time to focus on what none of them had addressed: the emotional layer around the decision itself. I would build this kind of scaffold on every project if time allowed, and push harder for the time when it doesn't.
Three things happened after launch worth being honest about. The wallet top-up flow created friction at the point of order placement that we hadn't fully designed for. Partial funds, unclear states, support tickets. It wasn't a BTD problem in origin but it became one in practice, and it took a separate fix to resolve. The efficiency framework, a concept that batched smaller orders to reduce redundant activity, was discontinued after launch because adoption drove API call volumes that made it expensive to sustain at scale. It worked well enough that the infrastructure couldn't keep up with it. And Stop Loss, which this project directly opened the door for, became one of Mudrex's strongest follow-on features. BTD didn't just ship a feature. It created the product language for an investment tools category that kept growing after I left. That last part I'm proud of.
We shipped a confirmation state, not a waiting state, and there is a real difference. Once a BTD order is placed, funds are locked and the user has no visibility until the trigger hits or they go looking for it. The reassurance concepts were the right instinct. What we didn't fully solve was the ambient anxiety of the wait itself: the checking, the second-guessing, the wondering whether the trigger price was set too high. A persistent lightweight order tracker that lived in the home feed rather than buried in a portfolio tab would have been the right answer. We didn't have the sprint time to get there. It's the part of this project I'd go back to first.
Everything we design adds force to the world. The question is not whether it moves something. The question is in which direction.