Designing
interfaces
that get out
of the way.

The problem

Field interviews in Patna and Indore surfaced a single recurring failure mode: users filling the IFSC field with their own account number — because the labels above the two inputs were visually identical, and the icons (a tiny bank vs a tiny card) too small to disambiguate at arm's length on a 5″ phone in midday glare.

The existing app violated heuristic 5 (error prevention), heuristic 6 (recognition over recall), and a quietly devastating amount of Gestalt similarity — the page read as one undifferentiated block.

Persona

Approach

The redesign was driven by three commitments. First — apply Fitts's Law to the most common action (transfer): a 96px primary tap target at the bottom-third of the screen, where the thumb already lives. Second — break the form into one-question-per-screen (Hick's Law: reduce choice density). Third — at every confirm step, restate the action in plain Hindi-English mixed copy, with the recipient's name and amount in Newsreader 28pt italic so the eye has something to anchor on.

Heuristic evaluation (5 reviewers)

The problem

Outpatient registration at PHC Sahyog took 9–14 minutes per patient through a single paper-based desk. Patients arriving at 6 am were often still waiting at noon. A previous kiosk pilot had been abandoned after staff observed elderly patients “pecking” at the screen with one finger, missing buttons, and walking away in frustration.

The previous kiosk had buttons of 32 × 32 px spaced 8 px apart. Per Fitts's Law on a 1.4m-distant kiosk screen, this is a near-impossible target for an unsteady hand.

Constraints

WCAG 2.2 AAA contrast (this is a hospital, not a brand). Fingertip-grade hit targets (≥ 72 px). Voice-first prompts in Hindi, Bhojpuri, and English. No more than one decision per screen. No use of the colour red except for true errors.

KLM analysis · before vs after

The problem

A learner opens the dashboard and sees: 14 tabs, 3 carousels, 2 banners, an assignment countdown, a discussion forum widget, and a “Recommended for you” strip that recommends the same six courses every week. There are too many entry points and no clear mental model of where I am, what I owe, and what's next.

This is a textbook violation of heuristic 1 (visibility of system status), of Miller's 7 ± 2, and most painfully — of the user's actual goal, which is to study.

Card sort (n=18)

18 learners sorted 34 dashboard objects into self-named groups. The convergent clustering collapsed cleanly into three buckets: “due now”, “keep learning”, and “explore later”. The redesign uses exactly that.

Information architecture

Cognitive walkthrough

For the goal “submit my Week-6 assignment,” the previous design required 5 decisions across 3 pages. The redesign requires 1 decision (tap “due now” item) and 1 confirmation. Steps fell from 5 → 2; M-operators from 3 → 1.