The design challenge

The core challenge wasn't just visual — it was architectural. The web app offered a broad feature set across project management, resource allocation, and time tracking. Mobile had a much narrower job: help team members register time quickly and accurately while on the go. That constraint forced deliberate decisions about hierarchy, scope, and navigation.

Calendar-first navigation

Research into how users engaged with time tracking on web revealed that the weekly total was the meaningful unit. Users weren't managing time day by day — they'd work longer on some days and offset on others, so the week as a whole was what mattered. Rather than replicating the full month, week, and day filter structure from web, mobile was built around that insight. The default entry point was the week view, with a clear drill-down into each day, making it faster to find the right task and register time against it.

Intentional feature restriction

With limited screen real estate and a specific use case, we made deliberate decisions about what mobile would and wouldn't support. Certain task metadata was surfaced as read-only — editable fields opened into a dedicated page rather than cluttering the primary view. Task deletion was removed entirely, a conscious choice to reduce the risk of accidental actions in a context where users are moving quickly. At the task level, the most frequently needed actions — flagging priority, marking as blocked, marking as bug, favouriting — were surfaced as icons at the top, keeping the most important controls within immediate reach.

Hierarchy and navigation depth

Translating the web experience to mobile meant rethinking information hierarchy from scratch. Where web could surface task details, metadata, and time entry in a single view, mobile required a layered flow. The challenge was determining how deep to nest without making the experience feel cumbersome — particularly for a use case that needed to feel fast and low-friction.

Reflection

Working at seed stage with a small design team meant taking on significant surface area with limited resource. It pushed me to make sharper decisions about prioritisation — not just within the product, but in how I worked. The mobile redesign also reinforced something I've carried since: the most important design decisions are often about what to leave out.