QuikTax: shaping the first real user journey After the first prototype, the next job was to move QuikTax beyond being a rough concept and start making it behave like a real product.
The early prototype proved that the idea had potential, but it also made something obvious: a tax app lives or dies on clarity. It is not enough to have the right screens. The user has to know where they are, what quarter they are looking at, what needs attention, and what happens next.
So this stage was about shaping the first real journey through the app.
The focus shifted from “can this exist?” to “does this flow make sense?” I started working through the main path a user would actually follow: opening the MTD area, seeing their quarter status, reviewing totals, and understanding whether they were ready to submit or still needed to make changes.
That meant tightening the structure of the app. The quarter views needed to feel more legible. Status needed to be easier to scan. Important numbers had to stand out without turning the interface into a wall of figures. And perhaps most importantly, the app needed to guide users forward without making them feel boxed in.
A lot of this work was about reduction. Early on, it is easy for a product to collect too much explanation, too many controls, and too much visual noise. I found myself stripping things back and asking the same question again and again: what does the user actually need to see at this point in the journey?
That process helped define the product more clearly. QuikTax started to feel less like a collection of tax-related screens and more like a guided reporting flow.
From the build log
This was the point where the internal structure of the app started to matter more. I worked through the layout of the MTD hub, quarter detail screens, and the hand-off into review and submission. The challenge was not adding more, but organising what was already there into a cleaner sequence.
Some of the most useful progress came from thinking about hierarchy. Deadlines, statuses, totals, and next actions all compete for attention in a tax product. If everything shouts, nothing is clear. So the work here was really about deciding what should speak first.
It also became clearer during this phase that QuikTax needed strong status handling from the beginning. Even before deeper submission logic was fully in place, the product needed a reliable way of signalling whether a quarter was in progress, ready, submitted, or locked. That idea would later become much more important as the HMRC submission flow developed.
In that sense, this stage was not just about interface polish. It was about laying the groundwork for trust.
Why this stage mattered
This was the point where QuikTax started to behave less like a prototype and more like a product with a point of view.
The app was beginning to answer practical questions properly. How does someone move through their quarter data? Where do they check whether they are ready? How do they tell the difference between something that is complete and something that still needs action?
Getting those answers right early matters, because once users start associating a product with uncertainty, it is difficult to win that confidence back.
Outcome
By the end of this stage, QuikTax had a more coherent reporting journey, with:
a clearer MTD hub structure
better quarter-level navigation
stronger hierarchy around statuses, totals and actions
a more guided path from review into submission
More importantly, the product was starting to establish one of its core principles: financial tools should not just function well, they should make people feel sure of what they are doing.
Next
With the main journey taking shape, the next step was to strengthen what sat underneath it: the submission flow itself. That meant moving from screen structure into the more sensitive side of the app, where actions needed to be tracked properly and success needed to mean more than a button changing state.