Just recently, Coinbase replaced its trading platform GDAX with Coinbase Pro. Coinbase Pro still uses the GDAX trading engine, but it features a new interface which "has been designed with the needs of the active trader in mind." While the change is mainly just a rebranding to make GDAX take advantage of the recognition which comes with the Coinbase name, I would like to use this post to discuss a few of the new features of the user interface in Coinbase pro.
Time frame menu is hidden behind Open Orders.
It appears that the user interface has not been made with small computer screens in mind. When I tried CoinBase Pro on my 14" laptop, I was confused as to why I could not choose a trading view of more than one hour.
It turns out that the drop down menu drops down behind the Open Orders window.
If you zoom out (emulating a larger screen size), the menu becomes smaller and the problem disappears.
I can not say for certain whether this was an issue in GDAX as well, as I've never really used GDAX with this small laptop.
The time frames are wrong.
What strikes me as weird, is how the graphs stop at the 18th of June, even if today is the first of July. At the same time, the Last trade price seems to match up well with the end of the graph.
This leaves two possible scenarios:
The Last trade price, the graph and the graph axis values are delayed by 13 days.
The Last trade price and the graph are correct, but the dates on the time axis are wrong.
What do the time frames even mean?
I don't know about you, but when I select a time frame of one hour, I expect to see a price chart displaying the price movement of the last hour. At least, that's how it is on the Coinbase app and how it used to be on GDAX.
The one hour data spans more than one week. This is not what I want to see. That being said, choosing one hour might mean that the sample rate of the data is one hour, similar to how it works in the Kraken price charts. Even if this is the case, I consider this a step in the wrong direction.
New orders are added to the bottom of the order book.
Again, I don't know about you, but when I've placed an order, I want to see that order appear in my order book.
New orders do indeed appear in the order book, but for some reason, they are added to the bottom, which, if you have a lot of open orders, is way below the bottom of your screen. Having to scroll down to see that the order has been added is very counterintuitive, especially considering that all previously added orders are sorted with the most recent order at the top of the order book. Funnily enough, after a while (or maybe just after refreshing the page?), the new order appears on the top of the order book, as it should. I never had issues like this with GDAX.
The currency trading pair menu has changed.
While the currency trading pair menu looks almost like before, it features a few aesthetical and functional changes. In GDAX, there used to be thin horizontal lines separating the ticker pairs which dealt with different cryptocurrencies. That way, all Litecoin trading pairs were visually separated from all the Ether trading pairs.
In Coinbase Pro, however, those horizontal lines have been removed, so the list of all trading pairs has become more difficult to navigate. To make things worse, the ticker pairs are no longer alphabetically sorted. GDAX users are used to having Bitcoin Cash pairs located right below Bitcoin pairs, but now the Bitcoin Cash pairs have been relocated to the bottom of the list.
Coinbase Pro does, however, introduce an exciting new feature here. It is now possible to only show currency pairs featuring a chosen native currency.
If you only trade with Euro, you will be delighted to find that you have the option to show only Euro trading pairs. As with all new Coinbase Pro features, there is a catch. If you choose to only show EUR trading pairs, this choice will not be remembered, so you have to select EUR every time you want to select a trading pair. Lol.
I think this sums up my first-time experience with Coinbase Pro quite nicely. I dislike most of the changes except for the option to show only trading pairs featuring a chosen currency, if my choice could only have been remembered. In my opinion it's still one of the greatest trading sites out there. I hope to see some of the bugs sorted out soon. After all, Coinbase made the site available to GDAX users a while ago, so it's obvious that they seek user input when it comes to improving the usability of the site.
