How it started
I moved to Berlin speaking German, and it was still one of the most disorienting things I have done.
The thing nobody warns you about is that the system assumes you already know how it works. A letter arrives from the Finanzamt in dense administrative German, the deadline is buried somewhere in the middle of a paragraph, and what you are actually supposed to do next is stated nowhere at all.
The problem was never a missing feature. It was the absence of anyone to tell you, clearly, what to do and in what order.
So when the chance came to build something real, I already knew what I wanted to make. I brought in three other engineers, and we gave ourselves eight days to find out how far we could get.
Making sure it was real
The frustration was personal, but personal is not the same as significant. The numbers clarified the scale:
4.4 million people relocated to the EU in 2023
71% reported anxiety about bureaucracy before they even arrived
Looking at what already existed confirmed the gap:
Expatica and InterNations publish articles but offer no sequenced steps
Government sites are accurate but say nothing about order, dependencies
Reddit threads push all the organising work back onto the person who is already overwhelmed
What the brief became
Nobody had put sequenced guidance, plain-language document explanation, country-specific personalisation, and deadline awareness in one place.
Three people from my own network sharpened the brief further:
Sofia lost three weekends to health insurance before anyone told her she had to register her address first
Kwame‘s employer support ended exactly where the complexity began
Lena was coordinating her own paperwork, two kids’ school enrolments, and her partner’s permit at the same time
Three people, three failure modes, pointing directly at the three things we chose to build: a checklist that understood dependencies, plain-language document explanation, and task organisation that knew what mattered most.
Three roles, eight days
I came in as the designer, took on engineering across the stack as the build progressed, and ended up coordinating the four of us. Before opening Figma or writing a line of code, I ran a scoping session to define what was realistically achievable in the time we had, which meant being as clear about what we would not build as what we would. We cut:
❌ A community forum
❌ A calendar integration
❌ Complex dependency logic around task cards
Each one would have been a legitimate feature with more time. Cutting them wasn't giving something up, it was deciding the scanner and the checklist deserved the full eight days instead of a third of it each.
❌ 👥 The hardest cut was multi-user support. Lena’s situation, juggling her own paperwork alongside her partner’s permit and two kids’ school enrolments, pointed at a real need: relocation rarely lands on one person alone. A shared workspace with tasks assigned across profiles was legitimate, not a nice-to-have, but the data model and permissions logic would have eaten a disproportionate share of eight days, and building it partially would have been worse than not building it at all. So Landed shipped single-user, with multi-household coordination as a defined next phase.
The design system came before the screens. Building fast on a shared codebase with no design tokens is how you end up with inconsistencies that cost more time to fix than they would have taken to prevent. I built the system in Figma and in SCSS simultaneously:
🔵 Primary blue for navigation
🟢 Chartreuse for progress and completion states
🟣 A lavender background, chosen deliberately to keep the interface from feeling clinical
By day two we could split into parallel tracks without anyone waiting on design input.
How the interface evolved
The product went through three meaningful versions over the eight days, not polishing passes: each one changed how the information was structured and what the interface asked of the user.
What changed between versions
🔹V1 was a card-based layout built to prove the document scanning concept worked. The information was there, but it was undifferentiated. The deadline, the amount owed, and the suggested next steps all competed for the same visual weight, and the document preview and the extracted results sat in separate parts of the screen. To cross-reference them, you had to scroll.
The problem was not that V1 failed to work. The document scanning held up, the extraction was accurate, and the card layout communicated the necessary information. What it did not do was reflect how that information was actually meant to be used: in parallel, not in sequence. Once that was clear, the layout had to change.
🔹V2 introduced persistent navigation and separated the document detail view from the dashboard. This was primarily a structural decision. The card approach had collapsed two different jobs — an overview and a deep-read — into the same view, and users were having to do the work of separating them mentally. Giving each its own context removed that cost.
The document detail still wasn’t right, though. The results panel was stacked vertically, which meant everything below the fold was invisible until the user scrolled, and the most important information, the deadline and the amount, was not visually distinct from the explanatory text.
The final version resolved this:
✅ Two-column layout: document preview on the left, extracted results on the right, so the user could read the source and the plain-language explanation simultaneously without losing their place
✅ Amount cards as the primary visual element, using conditional colour logic: money owed in red, a refund in green, zero as resolved
✅ The deadline sits directly below
✅ The AI chat panel sits below the key facts, for follow-up questions that do not fit the structured output
The hierarchy was now doing the job the content required.
The two decisions that defined the product
📃 The document scanner. This was the feature I cared most about
and the one that worried me most, because the UX decisions and the API architecture were tightly coupled. The flow is simple to describe:
A user uploads a bureaucratic document
The Anthropic API analyses it and returns structured data covering document type, key amounts, deadlines, and next steps
The interface surfaces that back in a form the user can act on
The challenge was everything underneath. German bureaucratic documents are not a uniform category, so the prompt had to identify what it was reading before deciding what to surface. A tax notification and a health insurance letter require different extraction logic, and the interface had to handle both without exposing that complexity to the user.
Once the API output was reliable, the design problem became hierarchy. The conditional colour logic on the amount cards was the decision I kept returning to: it made the most consequential information legible at a glance, without requiring the user to read anything to understand the state they were in.
✔️ The checklist. A wall of undifferentiated bureaucratic tasks breaks the progress mechanic before it starts, since motivation only works if early wins feel achievable. The category groupings, status badges, and confetti on task completion aren’t decoration: they signal that someone has already thought through the order of operations, so the user can follow the path rather than reconstruct it. In a product living inside a stressful life event, organising the information and managing the emotional register of the experience are the same job.
What happened when real people used it
Eight days from kickoff, the app went live in front of a live audience with the scanner, checklist, and dashboard all working. After the demo, five expats living in Germany used Landed with their own documents.
Each of them deciphered an official German document in under two minutes. The path they would normally take, Google Lens translation or waiting on a bilingual friend, takes ten minutes or more and still leaves the real questions unanswered, because general translation tells you what the words say rather than what you are supposed to do.
Three of the five noted without being asked that breaking large tasks into small steps with visible completion states made the overall workload feel achievable.
What they described was not efficiency. It was feeling in control of something that had always made them feel lost, which was the change the product was designed for.
I am not going to overstate five people. What this round could not tell me is whether the motivation mechanics hold up over weeks or how the scanner performs across the full range of document types in the wild. As a first read on whether the core idea works, it was about as clear as five sessions can be.
I think what got me was the progress tracking. It sounds like a small thing but when you're in the middle of a move everything feels like it's on fire and nothing ever feels done. Seeing tasks tick off, seeing the checklist actually get shorter, it gave me this little hit of calm that I didn't expect from an app. The whole thing is thoughtfully designed, nothing feels thrown in. Going through it brought back a lot of memories of my first weeks here and I just kept thinking, this would have helped so much.
Daniel B.
3 years in Berlin
Tried the scanner on a couple of different documents out of curiosity. Both times it picked out the right information straight away. Really liked that you can attach notes and set reminders on top of that, that combination is what makes it actually useful rather than just impressive. The loading time on the scan result is noticeable but not a big deal, especially since it tells you to expect around ten seconds. That small thing made a difference.
Sophia C.
6 years in Berlin
Progress tracking sounds like a small thing but it really isn't when you're new somewhere and have no idea if you're keeping up. Just watching the list shrink felt good. The document scanner is the same story, it works, it's not just decorative. Those two things together are what I'd mention if someone asked me about it. Didn't expect to be this positive about something at this stage but here we are.
I put a rental contract into the scanner mostly just to see what it would do. It picked out the right things straight away which I wasn't expecting. That thing of looking at a German document and having no idea what actually matters is something everyone goes through when they move here. This just deals with it. The rest of the app has the same feeling to it, like someone actually thought it through.
Micky D.
10 years in Berlin
The kanban view was what clicked for me. The whole relocation process stops feeling like one big blob of stress and starts feeling like something with a beginning and an end. The document scanner handles the other thing nobody tells you about, that you'll be looking at a lot of German paperwork you don't fully understand. A few more document types would be great eventually. Strong product overall.
Linda S.
Just relocated to London from Berlin
I think what got me was the progress tracking. It sounds like a small thing but when you're in the middle of a move everything feels like it's on fire and nothing ever feels done. Seeing tasks tick off, seeing the checklist actually get shorter, it gave me this little hit of calm that I didn't expect from an app. The whole thing is thoughtfully designed, nothing feels thrown in. Going through it brought back a lot of memories of my first weeks here and I just kept thinking, this would have helped so much.
Daniel B.
3 years in Berlin
Tried the scanner on a couple of different documents out of curiosity. Both times it picked out the right information straight away. Really liked that you can attach notes and set reminders on top of that, that combination is what makes it actually useful rather than just impressive. The loading time on the scan result is noticeable but not a big deal, especially since it tells you to expect around ten seconds. That small thing made a difference.
Sophia C.
6 years in Berlin
Progress tracking sounds like a small thing but it really isn't when you're new somewhere and have no idea if you're keeping up. Just watching the list shrink felt good. The document scanner is the same story, it works, it's not just decorative. Those two things together are what I'd mention if someone asked me about it. Didn't expect to be this positive about something at this stage but here we are.
I put a rental contract into the scanner mostly just to see what it would do. It picked out the right things straight away which I wasn't expecting. That thing of looking at a German document and having no idea what actually matters is something everyone goes through when they move here. This just deals with it. The rest of the app has the same feeling to it, like someone actually thought it through.
Micky D.
10 years in Berlin
The kanban view was what clicked for me. The whole relocation process stops feeling like one big blob of stress and starts feeling like something with a beginning and an end. The document scanner handles the other thing nobody tells you about, that you'll be looking at a lot of German paperwork you don't fully understand. A few more document types would be great eventually. Strong product overall.
Linda S.
Just relocated to London from Berlin
I think what got me was the progress tracking. It sounds like a small thing but when you're in the middle of a move everything feels like it's on fire and nothing ever feels done. Seeing tasks tick off, seeing the checklist actually get shorter, it gave me this little hit of calm that I didn't expect from an app. The whole thing is thoughtfully designed, nothing feels thrown in. Going through it brought back a lot of memories of my first weeks here and I just kept thinking, this would have helped so much.
Daniel B.
3 years in Berlin
Tried the scanner on a couple of different documents out of curiosity. Both times it picked out the right information straight away. Really liked that you can attach notes and set reminders on top of that, that combination is what makes it actually useful rather than just impressive. The loading time on the scan result is noticeable but not a big deal, especially since it tells you to expect around ten seconds. That small thing made a difference.
Sophia C.
6 years in Berlin
Progress tracking sounds like a small thing but it really isn't when you're new somewhere and have no idea if you're keeping up. Just watching the list shrink felt good. The document scanner is the same story, it works, it's not just decorative. Those two things together are what I'd mention if someone asked me about it. Didn't expect to be this positive about something at this stage but here we are.
I put a rental contract into the scanner mostly just to see what it would do. It picked out the right things straight away which I wasn't expecting. That thing of looking at a German document and having no idea what actually matters is something everyone goes through when they move here. This just deals with it. The rest of the app has the same feeling to it, like someone actually thought it through.
Micky D.
10 years in Berlin
The kanban view was what clicked for me. The whole relocation process stops feeling like one big blob of stress and starts feeling like something with a beginning and an end. The document scanner handles the other thing nobody tells you about, that you'll be looking at a lot of German paperwork you don't fully understand. A few more document types would be great eventually. Strong product overall.
Linda S.
Just relocated to London from Berlin
I think what got me was the progress tracking. It sounds like a small thing but when you're in the middle of a move everything feels like it's on fire and nothing ever feels done. Seeing tasks tick off, seeing the checklist actually get shorter, it gave me this little hit of calm that I didn't expect from an app. The whole thing is thoughtfully designed, nothing feels thrown in. Going through it brought back a lot of memories of my first weeks here and I just kept thinking, this would have helped so much.
Daniel B.
3 years in Berlin
Tried the scanner on a couple of different documents out of curiosity. Both times it picked out the right information straight away. Really liked that you can attach notes and set reminders on top of that, that combination is what makes it actually useful rather than just impressive. The loading time on the scan result is noticeable but not a big deal, especially since it tells you to expect around ten seconds. That small thing made a difference.
Sophia C.
6 years in Berlin
Progress tracking sounds like a small thing but it really isn't when you're new somewhere and have no idea if you're keeping up. Just watching the list shrink felt good. The document scanner is the same story, it works, it's not just decorative. Those two things together are what I'd mention if someone asked me about it. Didn't expect to be this positive about something at this stage but here we are.
I put a rental contract into the scanner mostly just to see what it would do. It picked out the right things straight away which I wasn't expecting. That thing of looking at a German document and having no idea what actually matters is something everyone goes through when they move here. This just deals with it. The rest of the app has the same feeling to it, like someone actually thought it through.
Micky D.
10 years in Berlin
The kanban view was what clicked for me. The whole relocation process stops feeling like one big blob of stress and starts feeling like something with a beginning and an end. The document scanner handles the other thing nobody tells you about, that you'll be looking at a lot of German paperwork you don't fully understand. A few more document types would be great eventually. Strong product overall.
Linda S.
Just relocated to London from Berlin
I think what got me was the progress tracking. It sounds like a small thing but when you're in the middle of a move everything feels like it's on fire and nothing ever feels done. Seeing tasks tick off, seeing the checklist actually get shorter, it gave me this little hit of calm that I didn't expect from an app. The whole thing is thoughtfully designed, nothing feels thrown in. Going through it brought back a lot of memories of my first weeks here and I just kept thinking, this would have helped so much.
Daniel B.
3 years in Berlin
Tried the scanner on a couple of different documents out of curiosity. Both times it picked out the right information straight away. Really liked that you can attach notes and set reminders on top of that, that combination is what makes it actually useful rather than just impressive. The loading time on the scan result is noticeable but not a big deal, especially since it tells you to expect around ten seconds. That small thing made a difference.
Sophia C.
6 years in Berlin
Progress tracking sounds like a small thing but it really isn't when you're new somewhere and have no idea if you're keeping up. Just watching the list shrink felt good. The document scanner is the same story, it works, it's not just decorative. Those two things together are what I'd mention if someone asked me about it. Didn't expect to be this positive about something at this stage but here we are.
I put a rental contract into the scanner mostly just to see what it would do. It picked out the right things straight away which I wasn't expecting. That thing of looking at a German document and having no idea what actually matters is something everyone goes through when they move here. This just deals with it. The rest of the app has the same feeling to it, like someone actually thought it through.
Micky D.
10 years in Berlin
The kanban view was what clicked for me. The whole relocation process stops feeling like one big blob of stress and starts feeling like something with a beginning and an end. The document scanner handles the other thing nobody tells you about, that you'll be looking at a lot of German paperwork you don't fully understand. A few more document types would be great eventually. Strong product overall.
Linda S.
Just relocated to London from Berlin
Continuous carousel with 5 testimonials. Playing
How it started
I moved to Berlin speaking German, and it was still one of the most disorienting things I have done.
The thing nobody warns you about is that the system assumes you already know how it works. A letter arrives from the Finanzamt in dense administrative German, the deadline is buried somewhere in the middle of a paragraph, and what you are actually supposed to do next is stated nowhere at all.
The problem was never a missing feature. It was the absence of anyone to tell you, clearly, what to do and in what order.
So when the chance came to build something real, I already knew what I wanted to make. I brought in three other engineers, and we gave ourselves eight days to find out how far we could get.
Making sure it was real
The frustration was personal, but personal is not the same as significant. The numbers clarified the scale:
4.4 million people relocated to the EU in 2023
71% reported anxiety about bureaucracy before they even arrived
Looking at what already existed confirmed the gap:
Expatica and InterNations publish articles but offer no sequenced steps
Government sites are accurate but say nothing about order, dependencies
Reddit threads push all the organising work back onto the person who is already overwhelmed
What the brief became
Nobody had put sequenced guidance, plain-language document explanation, country-specific personalisation, and deadline awareness in one place.
Three people from my own network sharpened the brief further:
Sofia lost three weekends to health insurance before anyone told her she had to register her address first
Kwame‘s employer support ended exactly where the complexity began
Lena was coordinating her own paperwork, two kids’ school enrolments, and her partner’s permit at the same time
Three people, three failure modes, pointing directly at the three things we chose to build: a checklist that understood dependencies, plain-language document explanation, and task organisation that knew what mattered most.
Three roles, eight days
I came in as the designer, took on engineering across the stack as the build progressed, and ended up coordinating the four of us. Before opening Figma or writing a line of code, I ran a scoping session to define what was realistically achievable in the time we had, which meant being as clear about what we would not build as what we would. We cut:
❌ A community forum
❌ A calendar integration
❌ Complex dependency logic around task cards
Each one would have been a legitimate feature with more time. Cutting them wasn't giving something up, it was deciding the scanner and the checklist deserved the full eight days instead of a third of it each.
❌ 👥 The hardest cut was multi-user support. Lena’s situation, juggling her own paperwork alongside her partner’s permit and two kids’ school enrolments, pointed at a real need: relocation rarely lands on one person alone. A shared workspace with tasks assigned across profiles was legitimate, not a nice-to-have, but the data model and permissions logic would have eaten a disproportionate share of eight days, and building it partially would have been worse than not building it at all. So Landed shipped single-user, with multi-household coordination as a defined next phase.
The design system came before the screens. Building fast on a shared codebase with no design tokens is how you end up with inconsistencies that cost more time to fix than they would have taken to prevent. I built the system in Figma and in SCSS simultaneously:
🔵 Primary blue for navigation
🟢 Chartreuse for progress and completion states
🟣 A lavender background, chosen deliberately to keep the interface from feeling clinical
By day two we could split into parallel tracks without anyone waiting on design input.
How the interface evolved
The product went through three meaningful versions over the eight days, not polishing passes: each one changed how the information was structured and what the interface asked of the user.
What changed between versions
🔹V1 was a card-based layout built to prove the document scanning concept worked. The information was there, but it was undifferentiated. The deadline, the amount owed, and the suggested next steps all competed for the same visual weight, and the document preview and the extracted results sat in separate parts of the screen. To cross-reference them, you had to scroll.
The problem was not that V1 failed to work. The document scanning held up, the extraction was accurate, and the card layout communicated the necessary information. What it did not do was reflect how that information was actually meant to be used: in parallel, not in sequence. Once that was clear, the layout had to change.
🔹V2 introduced persistent navigation and separated the document detail view from the dashboard. This was primarily a structural decision. The card approach had collapsed two different jobs — an overview and a deep-read — into the same view, and users were having to do the work of separating them mentally. Giving each its own context removed that cost.
The document detail still wasn’t right, though. The results panel was stacked vertically, which meant everything below the fold was invisible until the user scrolled, and the most important information, the deadline and the amount, was not visually distinct from the explanatory text.
The final version resolved this:
✅ Two-column layout: document preview on the left, extracted results on the right, so the user could read the source and the plain-language explanation simultaneously without losing their place
✅ Amount cards as the primary visual element, using conditional colour logic: money owed in red, a refund in green, zero as resolved
✅ The deadline sits directly below
✅ The AI chat panel sits below the key facts, for follow-up questions that do not fit the structured output
The hierarchy was now doing the job the content required.
The two decisions that defined the product
📃 The document scanner. This was the feature I cared most about
and the one that worried me most, because the UX decisions and the API architecture were tightly coupled. The flow is simple to describe:
A user uploads a bureaucratic document
The Anthropic API analyses it and returns structured data covering document type, key amounts, deadlines, and next steps
The interface surfaces that back in a form the user can act on
The challenge was everything underneath. German bureaucratic documents are not a uniform category, so the prompt had to identify what it was reading before deciding what to surface. A tax notification and a health insurance letter require different extraction logic, and the interface had to handle both without exposing that complexity to the user.
Once the API output was reliable, the design problem became hierarchy. The conditional colour logic on the amount cards was the decision I kept returning to: it made the most consequential information legible at a glance, without requiring the user to read anything to understand the state they were in.
✔️ The checklist. A wall of undifferentiated bureaucratic tasks breaks the progress mechanic before it starts, since motivation only works if early wins feel achievable. The category groupings, status badges, and confetti on task completion aren’t decoration: they signal that someone has already thought through the order of operations, so the user can follow the path rather than reconstruct it. In a product living inside a stressful life event, organising the information and managing the emotional register of the experience are the same job.
What happened when real people used it
Eight days from kickoff, the app went live in front of a live audience with the scanner, checklist, and dashboard all working. After the demo, five expats living in Germany used Landed with their own documents.
Each of them deciphered an official German document in under two minutes. The path they would normally take, Google Lens translation or waiting on a bilingual friend, takes ten minutes or more and still leaves the real questions unanswered, because general translation tells you what the words say rather than what you are supposed to do.
Three of the five noted without being asked that breaking large tasks into small steps with visible completion states made the overall workload feel achievable.
What they described was not efficiency. It was feeling in control of something that had always made them feel lost, which was the change the product was designed for.
I am not going to overstate five people. What this round could not tell me is whether the motivation mechanics hold up over weeks or how the scanner performs across the full range of document types in the wild. As a first read on whether the core idea works, it was about as clear as five sessions can be.
I think what got me was the progress tracking. It sounds like a small thing but when you're in the middle of a move everything feels like it's on fire and nothing ever feels done. Seeing tasks tick off, seeing the checklist actually get shorter, it gave me this little hit of calm that I didn't expect from an app. The whole thing is thoughtfully designed, nothing feels thrown in. Going through it brought back a lot of memories of my first weeks here and I just kept thinking, this would have helped so much.
Daniel B.
3 years in Berlin
Tried the scanner on a couple of different documents out of curiosity. Both times it picked out the right information straight away. Really liked that you can attach notes and set reminders on top of that, that combination is what makes it actually useful rather than just impressive. The loading time on the scan result is noticeable but not a big deal, especially since it tells you to expect around ten seconds. That small thing made a difference.
Sophia C.
6 years in Berlin
Progress tracking sounds like a small thing but it really isn't when you're new somewhere and have no idea if you're keeping up. Just watching the list shrink felt good. The document scanner is the same story, it works, it's not just decorative. Those two things together are what I'd mention if someone asked me about it. Didn't expect to be this positive about something at this stage but here we are.
I put a rental contract into the scanner mostly just to see what it would do. It picked out the right things straight away which I wasn't expecting. That thing of looking at a German document and having no idea what actually matters is something everyone goes through when they move here. This just deals with it. The rest of the app has the same feeling to it, like someone actually thought it through.
Micky D.
10 years in Berlin
The kanban view was what clicked for me. The whole relocation process stops feeling like one big blob of stress and starts feeling like something with a beginning and an end. The document scanner handles the other thing nobody tells you about, that you'll be looking at a lot of German paperwork you don't fully understand. A few more document types would be great eventually. Strong product overall.
Linda S.
Just relocated to London from Berlin
I think what got me was the progress tracking. It sounds like a small thing but when you're in the middle of a move everything feels like it's on fire and nothing ever feels done. Seeing tasks tick off, seeing the checklist actually get shorter, it gave me this little hit of calm that I didn't expect from an app. The whole thing is thoughtfully designed, nothing feels thrown in. Going through it brought back a lot of memories of my first weeks here and I just kept thinking, this would have helped so much.
Daniel B.
3 years in Berlin
Tried the scanner on a couple of different documents out of curiosity. Both times it picked out the right information straight away. Really liked that you can attach notes and set reminders on top of that, that combination is what makes it actually useful rather than just impressive. The loading time on the scan result is noticeable but not a big deal, especially since it tells you to expect around ten seconds. That small thing made a difference.
Sophia C.
6 years in Berlin
Progress tracking sounds like a small thing but it really isn't when you're new somewhere and have no idea if you're keeping up. Just watching the list shrink felt good. The document scanner is the same story, it works, it's not just decorative. Those two things together are what I'd mention if someone asked me about it. Didn't expect to be this positive about something at this stage but here we are.
I put a rental contract into the scanner mostly just to see what it would do. It picked out the right things straight away which I wasn't expecting. That thing of looking at a German document and having no idea what actually matters is something everyone goes through when they move here. This just deals with it. The rest of the app has the same feeling to it, like someone actually thought it through.
Micky D.
10 years in Berlin
The kanban view was what clicked for me. The whole relocation process stops feeling like one big blob of stress and starts feeling like something with a beginning and an end. The document scanner handles the other thing nobody tells you about, that you'll be looking at a lot of German paperwork you don't fully understand. A few more document types would be great eventually. Strong product overall.
Linda S.
Just relocated to London from Berlin
I think what got me was the progress tracking. It sounds like a small thing but when you're in the middle of a move everything feels like it's on fire and nothing ever feels done. Seeing tasks tick off, seeing the checklist actually get shorter, it gave me this little hit of calm that I didn't expect from an app. The whole thing is thoughtfully designed, nothing feels thrown in. Going through it brought back a lot of memories of my first weeks here and I just kept thinking, this would have helped so much.
Daniel B.
3 years in Berlin
Tried the scanner on a couple of different documents out of curiosity. Both times it picked out the right information straight away. Really liked that you can attach notes and set reminders on top of that, that combination is what makes it actually useful rather than just impressive. The loading time on the scan result is noticeable but not a big deal, especially since it tells you to expect around ten seconds. That small thing made a difference.
Sophia C.
6 years in Berlin
Progress tracking sounds like a small thing but it really isn't when you're new somewhere and have no idea if you're keeping up. Just watching the list shrink felt good. The document scanner is the same story, it works, it's not just decorative. Those two things together are what I'd mention if someone asked me about it. Didn't expect to be this positive about something at this stage but here we are.
I put a rental contract into the scanner mostly just to see what it would do. It picked out the right things straight away which I wasn't expecting. That thing of looking at a German document and having no idea what actually matters is something everyone goes through when they move here. This just deals with it. The rest of the app has the same feeling to it, like someone actually thought it through.
Micky D.
10 years in Berlin
The kanban view was what clicked for me. The whole relocation process stops feeling like one big blob of stress and starts feeling like something with a beginning and an end. The document scanner handles the other thing nobody tells you about, that you'll be looking at a lot of German paperwork you don't fully understand. A few more document types would be great eventually. Strong product overall.
Linda S.
Just relocated to London from Berlin
I think what got me was the progress tracking. It sounds like a small thing but when you're in the middle of a move everything feels like it's on fire and nothing ever feels done. Seeing tasks tick off, seeing the checklist actually get shorter, it gave me this little hit of calm that I didn't expect from an app. The whole thing is thoughtfully designed, nothing feels thrown in. Going through it brought back a lot of memories of my first weeks here and I just kept thinking, this would have helped so much.
Daniel B.
3 years in Berlin
Tried the scanner on a couple of different documents out of curiosity. Both times it picked out the right information straight away. Really liked that you can attach notes and set reminders on top of that, that combination is what makes it actually useful rather than just impressive. The loading time on the scan result is noticeable but not a big deal, especially since it tells you to expect around ten seconds. That small thing made a difference.
Sophia C.
6 years in Berlin
Progress tracking sounds like a small thing but it really isn't when you're new somewhere and have no idea if you're keeping up. Just watching the list shrink felt good. The document scanner is the same story, it works, it's not just decorative. Those two things together are what I'd mention if someone asked me about it. Didn't expect to be this positive about something at this stage but here we are.
I put a rental contract into the scanner mostly just to see what it would do. It picked out the right things straight away which I wasn't expecting. That thing of looking at a German document and having no idea what actually matters is something everyone goes through when they move here. This just deals with it. The rest of the app has the same feeling to it, like someone actually thought it through.
Micky D.
10 years in Berlin
The kanban view was what clicked for me. The whole relocation process stops feeling like one big blob of stress and starts feeling like something with a beginning and an end. The document scanner handles the other thing nobody tells you about, that you'll be looking at a lot of German paperwork you don't fully understand. A few more document types would be great eventually. Strong product overall.
Linda S.
Just relocated to London from Berlin
I think what got me was the progress tracking. It sounds like a small thing but when you're in the middle of a move everything feels like it's on fire and nothing ever feels done. Seeing tasks tick off, seeing the checklist actually get shorter, it gave me this little hit of calm that I didn't expect from an app. The whole thing is thoughtfully designed, nothing feels thrown in. Going through it brought back a lot of memories of my first weeks here and I just kept thinking, this would have helped so much.
Daniel B.
3 years in Berlin
Tried the scanner on a couple of different documents out of curiosity. Both times it picked out the right information straight away. Really liked that you can attach notes and set reminders on top of that, that combination is what makes it actually useful rather than just impressive. The loading time on the scan result is noticeable but not a big deal, especially since it tells you to expect around ten seconds. That small thing made a difference.
Sophia C.
6 years in Berlin
Progress tracking sounds like a small thing but it really isn't when you're new somewhere and have no idea if you're keeping up. Just watching the list shrink felt good. The document scanner is the same story, it works, it's not just decorative. Those two things together are what I'd mention if someone asked me about it. Didn't expect to be this positive about something at this stage but here we are.
I put a rental contract into the scanner mostly just to see what it would do. It picked out the right things straight away which I wasn't expecting. That thing of looking at a German document and having no idea what actually matters is something everyone goes through when they move here. This just deals with it. The rest of the app has the same feeling to it, like someone actually thought it through.
Micky D.
10 years in Berlin
The kanban view was what clicked for me. The whole relocation process stops feeling like one big blob of stress and starts feeling like something with a beginning and an end. The document scanner handles the other thing nobody tells you about, that you'll be looking at a lot of German paperwork you don't fully understand. A few more document types would be great eventually. Strong product overall.
Linda S.
Just relocated to London from Berlin
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What I took away
Running design and engineering in parallel changed what I noticed. The distance from decision to implementation was short enough that I caught UX problems in code I’d have missed entirely in Figma, since a layout that looks right in a static frame can break as soon as real content arrives. I wrote different specs as a result. Not more cautious ones, more honest ones.
The scanner made that concrete. The conditional colour logic, the two-column layout, the hierarchy of deadline over explanatory text: none of it was decoration, and none of it would have come directly from a brief. It came from being inside the build, watching the extraction behave, and designing against that.
The design system was solid on day one
The scope was settled before anyone opened an editor
The hard calls were made early rather than deferred until they became emergencies
The coherence of the final product was not the result of eight busy days. It came down to one morning, the system settled, the scope cut, the hard calls made, before anyone opened an editor.
What changed between versions
🔹V1 was a card-based layout built to prove the document scanning concept worked. The information was there, but it was undifferentiated. The deadline, the amount owed, and the suggested next steps all competed for the same visual weight, and the document preview and the extracted results sat in separate parts of the screen. To cross-reference them, you had to scroll.
The problem was not that V1 failed to work. The document scanning held up, the extraction was accurate, and the card layout communicated the necessary information. What it did not do was reflect how that information was actually meant to be used: in parallel, not in sequence. Once that was clear, the layout had to change.🔹V2 introduced persistent navigation and separated the document detail view from the dashboard. This was primarily a structural decision. The card approach had collapsed two different jobs — an overview and a deep-read — into the same view, and users were having to do the work of separating them mentally. Giving each its own context removed that cost.
The document detail still wasn’t right, though. The results panel was stacked vertically, which meant everything below the fold was invisible until the user scrolled, and the most important information, the deadline and the amount, was not visually distinct from the explanatory text.
The final version resolved this:
✅ Two-column layout: document preview on the left, extracted results on the right, so the user could read the source and the plain-language explanation simultaneously without losing their place
✅ Amount cards as the primary visual element, using conditional colour logic: money owed in red, a refund in green, zero as resolved
✅ The deadline sits directly below
✅ The AI chat panel sits below the key facts, for follow-up questions that do not fit the structured output
The hierarchy was now doing the job the content required.
What happened when real people used it
Eight days from kickoff, the app went live in front of a live audience with the scanner, checklist, and dashboard all working. After the demo, five expats living in Germany used Landed with their own documents.
Each of them deciphered an official German document in under two minutes. The path they would normally take, Google Lens translation or waiting on a bilingual friend, takes ten minutes or more and still leaves the real questions unanswered, because general translation tells you what the words say rather than what you are supposed to do.
Three of the five noted without being asked that breaking large tasks into small steps with visible completion states made the overall workload feel achievable.
What they described was not efficiency. It was feeling in control of something that had always made them feel lost, which was the change the product was designed for.
I am not going to overstate five people. What this round could not tell me is whether the motivation mechanics hold up over weeks or how the scanner performs across the full range of document types in the wild. As a first read on whether the core idea works, it was about as clear as five sessions can be.
