According to The New York Times, Scanner Pro was the best scanning app for iPhone and iPad in 2013. And even today, more than a million people around the world use this application every month. Scanner Pro has a long story, it was released for the first time in 2011, and since then, at least eight versions have appeared.
Scanner Pro evolution since 2011 to 2016, from the left to the right
In 2020 I joined the Scanner Pro team to design the brand-new Scanner Pro 8, which included many of the most requested features and improvements. At that time, the latest version was the Scanner Pro 7, which hadn't seen major updates since 2016.
The Scanner Pro team had done significant research work before I joined them. They defined the critical pain points of their current users and figured out an overall strategy for attracting new users in the saturated market.
Scanner Pro is known for its brand purple color. In the first iterations, we experimented with different color options: white, black, grey, and tens more. Based on our data, most documents people scan are receipts, invoices, and bills. Those documents have one thing in common — they all have white backgrounds. Considering that fact, we decided to keep the UI background dark so that the scanned documents would look contrasting and users would keep their focus on the content and not the UI elements.
While designing the edit screen, we had to consider a few factors; first of all, this is a separate mode where you can make changes to a scan, so it should not look like a scan viewer. Secondly, we still want to focus on the scan, not UI controls. In the previous version of the app, the edit mode had a white background, so it was hard to notice any changes when they were made, and also, there were UI controls from the left and right sides which overlayed the document and made it even harder to work with it.
In recent years iPhone cameras have improved their quality and were able to increase the scan zone and, at the same time, keep the excellent quality of scans. Also, we designed two scanning modes: auto and manual. The auto mode will detect and scan your documents automatically and collect them in a bunch, while in the manual mode, you have to tap on a shutter button to do that.
With advanced text recognition technology, we could add an ability to search not only through the document titles but also through the text inside the document, making it much easier for users to find the information they need.
The radar feature can detect almost 97% of your photos with text. In Scanner Pro 7, that feature was hidden under the icon on the top bar of the main screen. While talking to users, we realized it was not only hidden from them but also that the icon wasn't clear enough, so they didn't understand what it was. We moved that feature directly to the import screen to resolve this issue so everyone would notice it.
To measure the outcome of the redesign, I compared metrics such as revenue and downloads before and after the redesign. As you can see below, we significantly increased key metrics: revenue and downloads.
Revenue
Downloads
I worked on the Scanner Pro 8 for six months and collaborated closely with a product manager, engineers, and designers to define how the new version of the popular app should look. I was responsible for designing crucial parts of the user interface (both iPad and iPhone), from rough sketches to interactive prototypes.
The Scanner Pro 8 was featured as one of the best scanning apps on 9to5mac.com, iMore, iDownloadBlog, TechnikNews, and more.
