TinyUX — Low fidelity UX design on your mobile phone

My new app allows you to do simple UX work while you’re in on the go, in bed or on the toilet!

For over a decade I was a UX designer and also wrote a couple of well-read articles about UX tools, like ‘A True UX tool’. Currently I mostly write code, but I still do some UX work every now and then.

I used to work with Axure, but these days I often quickly draw something on my iPad and share it on Slack. Most of the time this is great, but sometimes an iPad is not at hand or not practical, so I created TinyUX:

The UI, a large wireframe created by TinyUX, and the info modal.

Design Principles

1: Streamlined for low fidelity

• UI space is sparse on a mobile phone. Low fidelity wire-framing also makes it easy to keep the UI simple.
• Not being able to add minute details, prevents you from wasting time on things that don’t matter when you need quick feedback.
• You often don’t need: animations, all colors, clickable elements, multi-line text.

2: It’s easier to work with grid

• It’s tedious to align shapes on an open canvas on your mobile phone.
• A wide grid based canvas allows you to quickly try out different solutions side by side.

3: No text!

• Why would you need text? you’re just tapping buttons on a canvas.
• Out of the box it’s for all languages.

Key features

• Grid based canvas you can draw icons, colors and text on
• Simple interface, with multiple boards to work on
• Exported images are auto-cropped

Dogfooding

Saturday in the early morning I was awake, but didn’t want to get up, my wife was still asleep. I was fooling around with Mastadon on my phone and trying to understand how it all worked.

I had an idea I wanted to get feedback on. It was the first time I used my app, because I needed it, not because I was testing it.

Image of how I imagined a setting could be in the Mastadon app.

It served the purpose, it lead to a short discussion and I learned a couple of things.

While it TinyUX sense for wireframes, you can also make simple flowcharts:

flowcharting on TinyUX

Roadmap

I’m planning to work towards these milestones:

1. Core features. Offline. Single purchase. [ DONE! ]
2. Enhanced version based on feedback. Export & import source files.
3. Optional subscription for online storage and premium features.
4. Neural net to import and interpret wire-frame and flow chart images.
5. UX Pattern library accessible inside the app with smart suggestions.

While most ux tools require subscriptions, the first version will be a single 5 dollar purchase. The price will increase quite a bit in later versions, but early buyers will receive all later offline features for free.

Get TinyUX on Google Play

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.juliushuijnk.tools.tinyux

Follow along

Follow progress, ask questions and give feedback on Twitter https://twitter.com/juliu or Mastadon https://indieweb.social/@Juliu

You can obviously also leave a comment over here :).

Side notes

I have many ideas for this app. Could I make some tweaks to also make it suited for writing music scores, interior layout design, electric circuit design? What do you Think?

P.S. If you or your silly kids rather draw silly faces, I also created this free android app (no ads).

P.S.2 In my article ‘A True UX’ from way back, I made the point that UX design is more than wireframing. Still true. TinyUX can hopefully be the starting point of this more holistic tool. Let’s see what happens.