Most apps are designed for someone with a laptop and 20 minutes. We’re designing for someone between clients with 30 seconds.
I’ve been building Boksy a booking and payments tool for solo beauty workers here in the PH and the thing that keeps reshaping every design decision is that
Our users don’t sit at desks.
A nail tech checks her schedule between appointments, hands still damp. A lash artist confirms a booking while her client is in the chair. A massage therapist sends a payment reminder on her commute home. The phone is not a secondary device. It’s the only device.
So we threw out most standard design logic.
No sidebar nav. Bottom tab bar only. Thumbs reach the bottom of a screen, not the top-left corner.
No dense dashboards. One primary action per screen wherever we can manage it. Earnings, calendar, bookings — each gets its own space, not a wall of widgets.
Status colors you can read at a glance. Paid is green. Pending is orange. No-show is red. You shouldn’t have to read text to know if a booking is confirmed.
Fast above everything. The app has to feel lightweight on a mid range Android on LTE. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t work for the people we’re building it for.
Warm, not clinical. Most paid services looks like it was built for an office. Boksy is for someone running a real business from her phone. The design should feel like it respects that.
The hardest part isn’t building features. It’s resisting the urge to add more and trusting that fewer, better interactions are the right call.
Curious if anyone else here has built for mobile-first users in the PH and what constraints changed how you designed things?