Designing well functional apps very fast, without comprimising on thoughtfulness, requires thinking outside the box of traditional processes, like the Stanford Design Thinking or the common 5 step procedure.
Today’s library of cognitive psychology, design systems research, and interface patterns is full of reliable contributions designers can use to design fast. Especially utilizing ChatGPT to get that knowledge on the spot can boost productivity, if you know what to search for. Pairing that with techniques like Rapid Prototyping and Guerilla Testing speeds up the process even further. Moreover, following the maxim good is good enough instead of driving for perfection, was key for this project.
We started with an information scaffold instead of an UI kit. The design system was developed simultanously with working on the flows.
↪ How to design effective UI at warp speed
Process
My personal scaffold exists out of psychological concepts, market opportunity, fitting UI patterns, Atomic Design, usability heuristics, economic fundamentals and accessibility references. This scaffold is basically a large PDF that guides me through design decisions.
Using a list of preliminary requirements from this scaffold, I agreed together with the dev-team on a technology that can support those. Those meetings also enabled them to already set up the backend, and thus decreasing time until the launch, before even receiving designs from me.
↪ Using an information scaffold
Design decisions
We noticed from earlier usertests on desktop that most users felt overwhelmed by the amount of formfields and checkboxes in tax declarations (even for our simple tax case there were 200+).
However, the information scaffold told me that an important usability heuristic is user freedom and control. Miller's law also suggested to focus on chunking information into smaller, digestible pieces to accommodate the short-term memory limitations of users. This was especially important in the design of the app’s form fields.
Given a small screen size and less input possibilities on mobile, we decided to go for a principle I named forced guidance.
↪ Forced guidance over user freedom
Design decision example
If you want to design at warp speed, UI libraries might be one of the first things that come to mind. However, after agreeing that we only need a handful of more complicated custom components and that we want the functionality to be somewhat similar to our webapp, we agreed that there is no library that support our needs. Technical difficuties for designing large, content-heavy forms and certain immaturities of libaries like TamagUI made developing natively the more efficient choice for us.
↪ Why we didn't use UI libraries
Design system
↪ Atomic Design
Design system
↪ Harmonizing with a team of remote developers
Product management
↪ Users loved not seeing to much at once
User testing
Once again, I got the realisation and real-world proof that good UX design is not about fancy components, micro animations or cool UI, but mainly about what the user expects where in your system and what information you need to provide for a smooth ride.
↪ Users loved not seeing to much at once
Learning
After 4 months of work, we published our first MVP to the appstore. The initial data suggest that the app works well and according to our goals. We achieved over 2000 installs in the first week, most of which with organic traffic. With an install to purchase rate of over 7%, management and product were very satisfied. The amount of customer support tickets was lower than on the website per purchase
↪ User-friendly tax declarations without headaches
Results
