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:

But it didn’t have to be that way—this is what they should have done (right).

How long would it have taken Robinhood to add a few sentences, and a link to an additional resource? 15 minutes?

And if they didn’t have time to write a full article explaining the situation, then they could have linked directly to a Twitter thread. Or, literally anything giving some context about this decision.

But, even though GameStop shares were hidden from the search results, it was still possible to get to the screen where you can normally buy and sell them.

Which introduced another complexity: how should Robinhood stop people from buying the shares, while still allowing them to sell their shares?

What they did was:

1: Disable the ‘buy’ button.

2: Add an unspecific notice explaining that you can’t buy shares right now.

It wouldn’t have taken much to make the UX of this considerably better. Even just a link to an explanation would have helped.

After some time, Robinhood announced that they would allow people to purchase a limited number of these shares, this included not allowing people to purchase part of a share.

For context, Robinhood is renown for fractional investing. This allows you to invest a small amount of money in companies with a high share price, for example, one share of Amazon costs more than $3,000, but a Robinhood user could invest $300 for 1/10th of a share.

This is the message they showed to people who tried buying a fraction of a share:

There are a few nuances here worth pointing out:

As the chaos unfolded, people started complaining that Robinhood were creating sell orders on their account, without their consent. Once these orders were placed, the user could not cancel them, and were instead shown an error message.

So, if there was ever an example of where a company needs to take an extra 5 minutes to really explain the situation, this is it.

Yet instead, Robinhood users saw an error message—and to demonstrate how rushed this entire process was, they forgot to put a full stop at the end.

I’ve made a few important changes here:

This controversy unravelled over a few days, and led many people vowing to leave Robinhood and take their portfolio elsewhere.

But there was a problem: other brokerages were asking for your existing portfolio statement to initiate a transfer, and for some people, Robinhood’s statement download function was broken.

So lets look at—and improve—the error message they displayed when people were trying to download their statements:

Unlike the other examples above, this error message doesn’t require more context, but it would have benefitted from suggesting an alternative step (e.g., emailing their customer support).

Or rather, imagine how frustrated you’d be if your bank’s app was broken and you couldn’t make any payments. You’d appreciate a suggestion of: “call us on [this number] to make a payment over the phone“.

One thing is certain: Robinhood were scrambling to react to these spontaneous decisions, and the execution was poor.

But the rush to push changes is not a valid excuse for a poor experience. In fact, it just fuelled the fire—probably contributing to the hundreds of thousands of 1-star ratings on the app stores, and Robinhood trending on Twitter.

So let’s summarise the key points here:

1: Context matters — take those extra few minutes to explain to your users why you’ve made a difficult decision.

2: Remove ambiguity — give people realistic expectations for when certain restrictions will be lifted, and what they can do in the meantime.

3: Show empathy — apologising isn’t enough, you need to demonstrate that you understand why your users will be suffering, and how hard it is for them.