How Robinhood handled a crisis

Last week Robinhood took unprecedented action and, without warning, temporarily restricted trading on immensely popular stocks like GameStop (GME).

The circumstances of these actions were controversial and upset millions of people.

But this isn’t a hit piece, and my opinion of whether the steps Robinhood took were necessary, fair or illegal are irrelevant.

In this instance, even the best user experience wouldn’t have stopped people from being upset, but would have acted as damage limitation.

As you’ll see, the total lack of context, explanation or empathy only fuelled the mob.

So what can we learn from Robinhood’s actions / inactions?

The first action that Robinhood took was to suddenly stop people from being able to purchase shares of GameStop.

But they also decided to actually remove GameStop from any search results.

This was an awful decision for a few reasons: