Mobile App UX/UI Design in Kharkiv, Ukraine

Mobile App Design in Kharkiv — UI/UX product work from discovery to App Store and Google Play

A mobile app for a business in Kharkiv and the Kharkiv region is no longer “optional” — it’s the core daily contact channel with the customer. Over 90% of Kharkiv residents use smartphones every day, fitness clubs on Sumska street and Pushkinska streets are launching their own apps instead of a Google Sheet of bookings, local Kharkiv food-delivery services have to compete with national aggregators on the same phone screen, and Kharkiv-region manufacturers are rolling out mobile CRMs for sales reps and shop-floor managers. In this context, “just a pretty Figma screen” isn’t a product — it’s a drawing. I’m Alex Filiuk, a Senior UI/UX designer with 15 years of experience, designing mobile apps for Kharkiv businesses with a focus on scenarios, design systems, and the details that show up on a real phone in a real user’s hand.

This page brings together everything a business owner or product manager from the Kharkiv region should understand before commissioning mobile app design: what the process looks like, how to choose between native iOS/Android and cross-platform, how much it costs, why a design system is an investment, not an extra line item, and how to avoid the typical mistakes that make a local product lose to national competitors.

Why a mobile app is critical for businesses in Kharkiv

In a city of 240,000+ residents with a high density of small and medium businesses, a mobile app delivers three things a website or Instagram cannot:

• A daily touchpoint. An icon on the home screen is a free banner the customer sees dozens of times a day. A bookmarked website is not.
• A push channel. A personalised message — “a 7 pm slot just opened at your gym on Sumska street” — arrives instantly and has CTRs many times higher than email or SMS.
• Scenario depth. Camera, geolocation, biometrics, NFC, haptics — all available natively, enabling features that don’t exist in the browser version.

Local fitness clubs, cafés, delivery services, beauty salons and medical centres in Kharkiv that launched mobile apps 2–3 years ago retain 30–50% of their active customer base inside those apps. Those still relying on a website and phone calls are losing the younger audience (18–35) to competitors — national or other local. If your business is in this category, a mobile app is no longer a “later” thing — it’s a market-share retention tool. Alongside it, plan your web presence, SEO, and SMM — together they form one ecosystem where the app is the final conversion point.

Types of mobile apps I design

There’s no “universal” mobile design — each business category has its own scenarios, patterns and success metrics. Before drawing screens, we agree which category your product falls into and what that means for architecture.

• Customer apps for local business. Loyalty, booking, orders, account areas. Typical Kharkiv clients — cafés, restaurants, fitness clubs, beauty salons, auto services. Key metrics — DAU/MAU, retention 7/30, repeat order frequency.
• Delivery and marketplaces. Catalog, cart, payment, tracking, ratings. Local Kharkiv food-delivery services, e-commerce stores with their own app. Key metrics — order conversion, AOV, time to delivery.
• B2B tools. Mobile CRMs, requests, execution control, document workflow. Kharkiv-region manufacturers, distribution, service teams. Key metrics — request handling speed, internal user NPS.
• Health and fitness. Workouts, nutrition, telemedicine, medical records. Key metrics — usage frequency, plan adherence, subscription retention.
• Education and courses. Content, progress, gamification, community. Private schools, language centres, tutoring hubs from Kharkiv working both offline and online.
• Own products and startups. SaaS apps from Kharkiv for the national or international market — a separate story, where I design both the MVP and subsequent iterations after user feedback.

Each category brings its own typical screens, navigation patterns and animations. If your product also needs a parallel web build or a full CRM/ERP system, we design the mobile and web parts in unified logic — saving weeks of alignment work.

Native iOS/Android or cross-platform — choosing the right stack

This is something I cover during discovery and that directly shapes the design. Briefly:

1. Native iOS (Swift, SwiftUI) and Android (Kotlin, Jetpack Compose). Best performance, best haptics, deepest OS integrations (Live Activities, Widgets, App Clips, Apple Pay/Google Pay, Wear OS, watchOS). Justified when the app is the company’s core product and the budget supports two codebases.
2. React Native. One codebase for iOS and Android with native feel, vibrant ecosystem, fast prototyping, the option to drop in a native module when needed. Suitable for most local-business customer apps in Kharkiv — loyalty, delivery, booking, account areas.
3. Flutter. One codebase, full pixel-level rendering control, excellent animation performance. Strong choice when a distinct visual style, complex motion, or one design language across iOS, Android and even Web matters.

I design so that the work cleanly maps to the chosen stack: on cross-platform I avoid effects only available in native UIKit; on native I use the full set of platform-specific features. Implementation is coordinated with the mobile development team — otherwise the design stays a Figma folder, not a product in the App Store.

How the design process looks — step by step

I work via a transparent process that all my clients have gone through over 15 years. Each stage has a fixed deliverable. No “trust the designer and wait a month” — you know what’s happening every week.

1. Discovery (week 1). Stakeholder interviews, market analysis (including local Kharkiv competitors), audience research, jobs-to-be-done, high-level user flows. If you’re in Kharkiv — discovery happens in person.
2. Information architecture (week 2). Sitemap, screen structure, low-fidelity wireframes for the key scenarios (onboarding, main use case, payment, profile). At this stage, nothing “pretty” yet — the goal is to validate logic as fast as possible.
3. Design system (week 3). Tokens (colours, typography, spacing, radii, shadows, motion), base components (buttons, fields, cards, navigation). Dark theme designed from scratch, not as “colour inversion”.
4. Hi-fi UI (weeks 4–6). Detailed key screens, empty states, error states, loading states (skeletons), adaptations for iPhone SE, Pro Max, Android with various densities.
5. Interactive prototype (week 7). Clickable Figma prototype with animations and transitions. Tested with 5–7 real users (often the client’s own Kharkiv customers), friction points are captured and fixed.
6. Animations and micro-interactions (week 7). Lottie/Rive files, video references, haptic feedback specifications.
7. Handoff (week 8). Delivery via Figma Dev Mode with tokens and dev notes ready for engineering. Design walkthrough with the dev team — and ongoing support during implementation.

The total cycle is 6–10 weeks depending on scope. If the project runs in parallel with mobile development or web development for a paired version, some stages overlap, saving calendar weeks without quality loss.

How much does mobile app design cost in Kharkiv

The price comes from the scope of work, not from geography — a resident of Kharkiv, Kyiv or Los Angeles gets the same rates for the same scope. Approximate ranges (exact figures are in the “Pricing” block above):

• MVP package. 8–12 key screens, 1 platform (iOS or Android), basic design system, simple prototype. Suitable for a Kharkiv local business launching v1 to validate a hypothesis before bigger development investment.
• Standard package. 25–40 screens, both platforms (or full cross-platform), full design system with components, dark theme, prototype and animations, Dev Mode handoff. The most popular choice among Kharkiv clients.
• Premium / product package. Complex architecture (for example, a B2B app with multiple roles: admin, manager, client), deep component customisation, end-to-end event analytics, A/B variants of key scenarios, extended app brand-book. Chosen by companies launching the product as their core business.

Worth a separate note: if you order design together with development, a web part, or branding — the bundled package costs less than the sum of individual services. Healthy business sense — savings for you and more efficient work for me (one context, one logic). Before kicking off, I also recommend business consulting to sharpen positioning and audience — that pays back many times over during discovery.

Common mistakes when commissioning mobile app design

Over 15 years I’ve seen dozens of cases where a Kharkiv business (and across Ukraine) overpaid or got a poor result through typical mistakes. Here are the key ones:

• “Design first, scenarios later.” Antipattern. Design without clear jobs-to-be-done is a pretty Figma folder that you’ll have to rework 70% of after the first week of real-user use.
• “Let’s copy a competitor’s interface.” Local Kharkiv businesses sometimes copy national-app screens (think Glovo, monobank). Problem: those products have different resources, teams and metrics. A copy is always weaker than the original — you need your own design that accounts for your context.
• “Only iOS — Android later.” Often this means “Android never”, because in Ukraine and in Kharkiv the Android share is 70%+. Designing from scratch for one platform and then “adapting” is re-design — i.e., +60–80% to the budget.
• Ignoring the design system. Drawing 20 screens “from scratch”, without tokens or components. A month later the client adds a feature — and 15 screens have to be reworked because there’s no shared logic. A design system saves 30–50% of the budget over the long run.
• Handing off only PNG. Engineers receive PNGs and “guess” the font, spacing and shadow colour. Result — approximate implementation with deviations. Always — Figma Dev Mode + dev notes, no exceptions.
• No real-user testing. “We saved on UX research.” Outcome — an app where 60% of customers don’t reach payment because it’s unclear what to tap. Fixing this after release costs 10× more than catching it in the prototype.
• No analytics or metrics from day one. The app is live and we don’t know how many open it, where they drop off, how many return the next day. You can’t optimise what you don’t measure. I bake analytics events into specs from the start.

Modern mobile app design trends 2025–2026

Mobile design evolves fast. Here are the trends I keep in mind when working for Kharkiv businesses:

• Liquid Glass / Material 3 Expressive. Apple and Google are simultaneously moving toward translucent, dynamic UI elements with depth. Designs need to be ready for these visual languages.
• AI-driven personalisation. Content and UI adapt to user behaviour — recommendations, smart defaults, personalised onboarding. Requires variability baked into the design system.
• Bottom sheets instead of full-screen modals. More thumb-friendly, feels faster. The de-facto 2025 standard for most scenarios.
• Skeleton loading + optimistic UI. The request hasn’t returned, but the interface already shows the expected result. The user perceives the app as instant.
• Haptics as part of UX. Not “vibrates sometimes”, but a specified pattern — light, medium, success, warning impact on specific actions.
• Dark mode by default. No longer a “bonus” — a must-have. Each screen is designed in both themes simultaneously.
• Accessibility (WCAG, Dynamic Type, VoiceOver/TalkBack). Mandatory for App Store Review and simply for reaching a wider audience — in Kharkiv that includes older customers too.

Cases: mobile apps for businesses in Kharkiv and across Ukraine

My portfolio includes 130+ projects, of which ~40 are mobile apps across categories: from customer apps for local business to complex product B2B services. I’ve worked with clients from Kharkiv, Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa, plus the USA (New York, Los Angeles) and Europe. This shows me how local Kharkiv businesses compete with national and international products on the same phone screen — and how design can swing that fight toward the smaller player.

If you want concrete examples, go to the “Projects” section or get in touch via the contact form: I’ll pick 5–10 most relevant cases for your category and show not just the final screens but the working process — wireframes, design system, prototypes, dev handoff. That gives you a real sense of what you receive.

What you receive after project completion

• Final design in Figma: all screens in hi-fi, both platforms (or cross-platform), dark theme, every state (default, loading, empty, error, success).
• Design system with components: tokens, base components, patterns, documentation — ready to scale the product.
• Interactive prototype: clickable, with animations, openable on a phone via Figma Mirror.
• Animations: Lottie/Rive files, video references, haptic feedback specs.
• Dev handoff: Figma Dev Mode with tokens and code snippets, dev notes on key screens, walkthrough with the engineering team.
• Analytics specs: a list of events to track with parameters (for Firebase, Amplitude, Mixpanel).
• Exclusive proprietary rights to the created design — fixed in the contract.
• Post-delivery support: 30 days for questions, minor revisions, technical consultations for engineers free of charge.

My other services for businesses in Kharkiv

A mobile app is part of an ecosystem. If you’re planning a serious launch or a redesign, a complex approach is worth considering:

• Mobile app development — full cycle from design to App Store and Google Play release.
• UI/UX web design — paired web version in unified style with the mobile app.
• Web development — landing page, corporate site, customer account area.
• UX audit — deep analysis of an existing app before redesign.
• Product strategy — positioning, roadmap, metrics before design starts.
• Branding — visual identity that flows into the app design system.
• Conversion optimisation — A/B tests and iterations after release.
• Google Ads and SMM — install traffic in Kharkiv and the region.

Mobile app design in other Ukrainian cities

I work not only with businesses from the Kharkiv region. If you have offices in several cities or are planning regional/national expansion — we’ll build a product that scales. Among other locations I actively work with:

• Kyiv — product teams, fintech, e-commerce, national-scale IT startups
• Lviv — IT outsourcing and own products, gastronomy with a mobile experience
• Odesa — e-commerce, tourism, logistics
• Dnipro — B2B products, manufacturing software, fintech
• Kharkiv — IT teams, education platforms, engineering

The full list of locations is on the “Service Areas” page.

Ready to discuss a mobile app design for your business in Kharkiv?

If you have a specific request — fill in the contact form or write to email/Telegram (contacts in the website footer). The first consultation is free, up to 60 minutes long. We’ll discuss your business, your Kharkiv and regional audience, key product scenarios, an approximate budget and timeline. After that I’ll send a detailed proposal with a fixed price — no surprises and no hidden fees.

I’m ready to design a mobile app for your business in Kharkiv that holds users in a daily habit loop, beats national competitors on the details, and pays back the investment not “someday”, but in the first 6–12 months after release. Not “another app in the App Store”, but a working product that grows with the business.