Design · 29 May 2026 · 6 min read
Most apps have forty screens. Five of them carry the entire business. Spend your design budget accordingly.
Design budgets get spread evenly across a product. They should not be. A handful of screens carry nearly all the outcome.
The five
First launch, because it decides whether anything else gets seen. The core action, because it is the reason the app exists. The empty state, because every user starts there and most designs ignore it. The payment screen, because friction here is measured directly in revenue. And the error state on the core action, because it decides whether a bad moment becomes a deleted app.
Everything else can be competent and conventional. These five should be genuinely good.
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