Squeezing a 30-year financial model onto a phone screen
Two weeks ago I posted Viso here for the first time. Since then the most common piece of feedback has been that the mobile experience is difficult to use. The original mobile experience was basically the desktop layout with panels stacked and squished, which is a bad answer for a tool whose whole value is a dense 30-year projection table.
Spent the last stretch rebuilding the mobile experience from scratch instead of just trying to re-use components of the desktop view. Wanted to share what changed and why, since I went back and forth on a few of these decisions.
The core problem
Desktop Viso is a 3-panel layout: assumptions rail, a dense financial ledger table, and a chat panel — all visible at once. That's the right layout when you have 1440px of width. On a 375px phone, the components are not optimized for the smaller screen and often feel crammed.
What changed
1. A real Home tab, not a squished ledger. Instead of landing on the dense table, mobile now opens on a verdict card ("Cleared to close" / "Numbers don't add up") plus a Conservative→Aggressive risk spectrum, with the full ledger, purchase planner, and charts as expandable entry points below it. The idea: on a phone, lead with the answer, let people drill into the math if they want it.
2. The ledger became expandable cards, not a squeezed table. A 30-year table with 20+ rows just doesn't work at 375px wide no matter how small the font gets. Instead, mobile groups everything into four tappable cards (Income, Cash Flow, Property, Assets) that expand to show detail, plus a timeframe toggle (After Purchase / Yr 1 / Yr 5 / Yr 10 / Yr 30) so you're not scrolling through 9 columns.
3. The "Adjust" panel became an accordion instead of a push-navigation flow. First version of this had tapping into an assumption group (like "Your Home") push you to a whole new screen. Worked, but felt disconnected from the verdict/spectrum context you'd just been looking at. Switched it so assumptions unfold in place — tap a group, it expands right there, still see everything else around it.
4. Charts got consolidated into one tile with a toggle instead of three separate static cards, and moved below the purchase planner (closing-day math felt like the more urgent thing to see first, trend charts second).
Would love feedback on:
Does the Home-tab-first structure make sense?
Is the accordion Adjust panel intuitive, or does it feel cluttered when a section has a lot of fields?
Anything that still feels obviously "this was designed for desktop first"?
viso.money if you want to poke at it on your phone (or desktop, I'll take any feedback!). Appreciate any eyes on it.
