Hooh — Document Workspace

After Hooh shipped the reading experience, the next gap was action: people understood their documents but still retyped the same data (name, ID, address, tax number) into every new form.

Smart Fill closes that gap. Hooh recognizes form fields and fills them from documents the user has already uploaded, then lets them sign and save without leaving the app. Around it grew a full workspace, from markup and translate to merge and compress, one tap from the open document.

Delivery: 6 weeks, end to end
System: One scaffold for every tool

Team: PM, Product Owner, Art Director, iOS and Web Developers
My Role: Product designer. Responsible for UX, UI, and the Xcode prototype for Smart Fill, signature, version management, and supporting document actions
Year: 2026

Problem

Even when a document is clear, acting on it still costs time. People retype the same personal data into every new form, hunt for the place to sign, then convert the result to share or store it. Every step that pushed them into another app was a place where the workflow leaked, and with it the reason to keep using Hooh. The first release solved reading; everything after it was still manual.

Task

Turn Hooh from a reading tool into a complete document workflow: let people fill and sign any form on iOS with data from the documents they have already uploaded, without losing control over what gets submitted.

Users

The same audience as the first Hooh release: expats, digital nomads, and people without a legal background. New forms keep coming: visa applications, lease agreements, school paperwork, banking contracts.

Scope

Smart Fill mode with manual fallback, a signature flow that supports both drawing and camera capture, an explicit save and version model, and the remaining tools on shared rules: markup, translate, scan to text, merge, pages, convert and compress.

Design process

The first release showed a clear pattern: the data a new form asked for was usually already in a document the person had uploaded. Smart Fill grew out of that: Hooh recognizes the fields and reuses what it already knows, so nobody retypes.

The constraint shaping every decision below was trust. Auto-fill is only useful if the user can see what was filled, override it, and turn it off entirely. The whole flow was designed around that veto.

1. Smart Fill under the user’s control

Hooh recognizes form fields and fills them from the user’s stored documents, and nothing is submitted silently. When Smart Fill has a match, the documents it drew from stay pinned at the top, so the user sees its sources; any value can be overridden in place; and a single toggle hands the whole form back to manual entry. It defaults to on because the time saved is the point, but the user is never more than one tap from doing it by hand. When a field has no match, the form highlights it and keeps moving: an unfinished form is a normal state, not an error.

The More guidance sheet — the form explains exactly what a field expects before the user types — Smart Fill fills every field it can source from the user’s own documents, then hands back control: tap More and any field explains exactly what it expects, unsourced fields stay flagged in place (save now, finish later), and a single tap empties the form back to manual entry

A tapped field opens with its explanation and the exact source document pinned to the value — Control at field level: a tapped value opens with its explanation and the exact source document, fields with a fixed set of options use a picker, and the eye previews the filled document before anything is saved

Marital status — enumerated fields pick from a native list instead of free typing — Control at field level: a tapped value opens with its explanation and the exact source document, fields with a fixed set of options use a picker, and the eye previews the filled document before anything is saved

2. One signature for every document

One signature, made once. Draw it on the canvas or capture an existing one with the camera. Either way it is saved to a library, ready to drop into the next document.

Capturing an existing signature with the camera — The saved signature drops onto the signature line in one tap: drag to move, pinch to resize

The saved signature dropped onto the W-4’s signature line — drag to move, pinch to resize — The saved signature drops onto the signature line in one tap: drag to move, pinch to resize

3. Markup and edits in one panel

Markup is usually where an editor fills up with controls. Hooh keeps one tool switcher and one color system for everything: marker, text, shapes, freehand ink. The tool appears where the user touches, its settings live in a single sheet, and everything drawn sits as a separate layer above the original. Undo one mark or clear the whole markup: the source page never changes.

Two taps of undo peel off a highlight and a note. Any placed mark can also be picked back up, tweaked or deleted

4. The original stays untouched

Saving never overwrites by accident. The original file stays untouched. The user can save a new copy or branch off a brand-new document, and every version lives inside the document itself: you switch between them from the top bar and rename them in place. Working on the same form again and again keeps every state without cluttering the document list.

The original, filled and signed versions sit inside one document; any of them can be saved as a new one

Other tools

The remaining tools round out the workspace, all on the same rules and all reachable from the same document screen. Each is a complete flow in miniature: pick, one amber Confirm, done.

Every tool is one tap away: the All-actions sheet rises over whatever document is open, and nothing lives more than one level deep

Translate & Scan to text: one engine reads the page. The whole document in another language, then the same result as key data, every field one tap to copy

Merge: pick documents from the library, reorder, optionally compress; the result saves as a new version

Pages: drag pages into a new order, straighten a sideways scan, add or duplicate pages in place

Convert: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, text or images; the export saves as a new copy, never over the original

Compress: three quality presets, from gentle to maximum; the result lands as a new copy

What’s next? — share, email, download, print, convert or compress, offered the moment a flow completes — And every flow ends the same way, never in a dead end: “What’s next?” lines up the follow-up actions the moment the work is saved

Outcome

Every screen ran live on iOS: the developers got a recording and a spec for every flow, along with the design system and components.