Cobalt App

Cobalt's app is used quickly, often one-handed, often mid-task: someone glancing at a phone between other things, not sitting down for a considered session. The interface needed to get out of the way and let people finish what they came to do without a second of hesitation about where to tap.

Early prototypes buried common actions behind menus that made sense on a whiteboard, organized by feature category, but not in someone's hand, organized by how often each thing actually gets used. Primary actions sat the same visual distance away as rarely-touched settings, and several key controls landed outside a comfortable one-handed thumb reach on larger phones. The app needed a structure built around real usage patterns, not an org chart of features.

We mapped the actual user journeys first, not the full feature list, but what people do in the first five seconds of opening the app, then designed the interface around the three or four things people do most, surfacing those, and only those, on the primary screens within easy thumb reach. Everything else moved a tap deeper, organized by actual frequency of use rather than internal feature hierarchy. Native iOS interaction patterns were used throughout rather than custom-built equivalents, so gestures behave the way the OS already trained people to expect.