How GraphQL can elevate your design impact (part 1)

Probably the single most impactful thing you can do to unlock your design team’s potential

When I was working for a major bank, we designed a solution to help a user collect their tax statements. We had lots of data that this was a constant user pain-point. Many users didn’t know which statements counted as tax statements, and even if they did, it was tedious to look through their accounts to find and download them. Meanwhile, on the bank side, we KNOW which statements are tax statements. They are tagged as such in our data. With this in mind, we proposed a simple solution: we added a single button a user could press to download all tax statements for the last n years. It tested great in mock-ups and was rated “highly desirable” by our user panel.

Unfortunately, the solution was rejected by our development team. It turns out that the way the back-end was written, there was no way to do what we wanted efficiently. From their side, they only had the following API calls:

• fetch a list of account IDs for a user
• fetch a list of statement IDs(within a time range) for an account ID
• fetch a particular statement by its ID