orderbook UI

[jedmccaleb]

Change order book to be more clear: https://www.bitstamp.net/market/order_book/

[justmoon]

Duplicate of #193. What exactly do you want us to copy from Bitstamp's order book?

I can see four differences:

1. The bids table is mirrored. Don't like. Makes it harder to quickly see the current spread and its divergence.
2. The bid and ask columns are both titled "Price". It's unusual compared to the standard level II table you'll find at stock exchanges, forex exchanges or finance text books, but as long as it says Bids and Asks right above it, you can pretty easily deduce which is the Bid column and which the Ask column. So it seems ok and maybe it helps novice users.
3. There is a value column. Pretty pointless column since they already have an Amount column where you can get a sense of the magnitude of each orderbook entry. And in turn they lack a cumulative column like "Sum". Don't like.
4. There is a market depth chart above the order book. Our Trade page is already quite crammed, but we can maybe make a slim depth chart like a sparkline that you can expand on demand or something.

[JoelKatz]

The information displayed is exactly right. And the format in which information itself appears is clear and according to standards. The problem is that the layout surrounding the information makes it needlessly hard to figure out what information you're actually looking at.

One thing that would help is to change the column heading from "amount". "Amount" is completely ambiguous -- amount of what? Prices are amounts too, so this is extremely confusing.

If it's the amount offered, the heading should be "amount offered". If that's too much text, then it should be shortened to "offered" with "amount" implied rather than the reverse. On the other side, it's the amount sought or wanted. I'm not sure what the perfect one word heading is for this. Perhaps "asked". But, again, just having "amount" is useless.

The other issue is the "bid" and "sum" headings. They're presented with incorrect units. For example, in the BTC/XRP order book, I'm told that the "Bid"s are presented in XRP. They are not. They are presented in XRP per BTC. These are distinct units.

Either the units should be omitted or they should be correct. They could also be in the column heading. For example, changing "Ask" to "Ask XRP/BTC" would make it clear.

The fields where you place an order are a great example of where everything is correct. The price is clearly marked "each" and the text description ensures that someone knows exactly what they're about to do. Perhaps this could be used with the order book as well. For example, mousing over a line in the order book could present the order in text form similar to the order placing. This would be extremely helpful for people who forgot what they were looking at. Just mouseover and order and it's explained in text -- then you know where you are and can figure out what the other orders mean too.

Remember, our target market is not professional traders but people who are trying to figure out how to trade. Being intuitive is, dare I say it, even more important than meeting professional standards in what is not meant to be a professional trading platform. (Not that we should gratuitously ignore them, of course.)

[ahbritto]

The wiki page referred to in #193 calls the "Amount" field "Order Size".

[justmoon]

For example, in the BTC/XRP order book, I'm told that the "Bid"s are presented in XRP. They are not. They are presented in XRP per BTC. These are distinct units.

That's common usage in physics. In finance, prices are given as the price of one unit for sale. So for example a tv costs 200 USD, not 200 USD/TV. It's the same with stocks and currencies, prices are always given as unit cost with the counter currency as the unit.

In forex specifically there is another notation with is pretty much exclusively used. That notation is to print the pair followed by the quotation, e.g.: "EUR/USD 1.2500" - Note that a physicist would write this as "1.25 USD/EUR". You can see how these two forms look very much alike except they mean the exact opposite thing. "1.25 USD" is the only form I could find that is reasonably intuitive for both physicists and finance people and unambiguous. It's mostly used in the stock market, but it is used sometimes in forex as well.

It should be noted also that it is uncommon in financial tables to print units in every cell. So there may be some improvements in that direction. We might choose to put the unit in the heading of the column for example.

One thing that would help is to change the column heading from "amount". "Amount" is completely ambiguous -- amount of what? Prices are amounts too, so this is extremely confusing.

Ok, you have a point. To be fair, the values in that column have a unit, for example BTC. So when you ask "amount of what?" - well, amount of BTC ... for that order. Looking at dozens of Level II tables, I found the most common headings for this column are "Quantity" or "Qty", "Shares" (in the case of stock exchanges), "Ask Volume" or "Bid Volume" and finally "Size". The label "Amount" is used almost exclusively in the Bitcoin world - MtGox (under "Open Orders") and Bitstamp primarily. BitcoinCharts uses "Volume" and Bitcoin-24 uses "BTC size".

The diversity in naming might hint at something. It really doesn't matter all that much what you call the columns. Anyone who knows what an order book is knows roughly what columns to expect. Anyone who doesn't probably won't know what to do with the information even if he did understand the columns.

So maybe, rather than coming up with different labels for the columns, maybe what we need is one of those "What is this?" links next to the title "Order book". So people who don't know how an order book works can learn what it is, what it's used for and what the different columns mean.

[JoelKatz]

What do you think of having an order describe itself in text if you mouseover it? The description could be the same as the way an order is described before you place it.

[justmoon]

Sounds good to me!

[jedmccaleb]

Yeah I'll give something more clear once this issue gets toward the top of the list

[ripper234]

The orderbook is indeed confusing and hard to work with. The top thing that's missing is THE PRICE. E.g. right now I see this order:

10BTC 10BTC 5,000.00000XR

And have to parse it mentally to understand the price per BTC/XRP. The above order should show 500 somewhere.

[justmoon]

The Bid and Ask column contains the price. So in your example you would be trading 10 BTC against 50000 XRP, giving a price of 5000 XRP, not 500 XRP.

Since several people have had problems with that, I'll rename those columns "Price" or "Ask Price"/"Bid Price" to make it more clear.

[vhpoet]

I'm closing this, as we are redesigning the trade page and there is an open issue #447. I'll let Eli know about this discussion.