Mighty Mile
Gig workers do not have a convenient way of tracking miles driven for deducting taxes, and easily miss out in over $10k a year!
Im building a native iOS app that tracks, deducts and exports IRS complicit documents for gig workers.
● Credits
Microsoft
2022
Date
Michael Diaz
Parker Young
Daniel Krenn
Team
Figma
After Effects
Pipeline
As covid rolled through the planet 2 years ago many people lost their jobs and scrambled to find alternative means of making ends meet.
Gig jobs such as Uber and Instacart do not educate their workers on the rules of independent contracting in an accessible way, leading to many not realizing their full tax deductions until the following year, or at all, potentially losing out on thousands of dollars in write offs.
Project Overview
In these trying times I am taking the opportunity to build a tool to educate, increase returns on expenses & eliminate friction when tax season comes around.
Not Everyone is a tax Expert
Covid is creating a huge influx of new gig workers that do not know the tax implications of being an independent worker and only to find out the year after during tax season.
A work assistant that educates, tracks miles and deducts expenses without extra effort.
I have personally became aware this problem and found that nobody is directly framing and solving this problem. I have a huge urge to build product market fit and launch this service for the current covid situation & future gig workers.
Problem Statement
Solution
Self Motivation
Being an independent contractor has far more complexity that Uber, Instacart, etc leads to believe
Features
Key Insights
When working for uber, eats, doordash ect. your phone is your source of agency and work. As some might assume drivers do not have only the driver app open while working.
Most drivers have their maps open for directions, music starting and stopping every-time they get out the car, some sort of mile tracker for taxes, & finally their gig worker app such as uber/doordash.
Building an app that fits into the drivers app stack must consider how they use the app in conjunction with other apps.
Starting a Trip
Swiping upwards forces a deliberate but simple action that drivers can achieve without directly looking at the app & quickly build muscle memory when cycling through their app stack while working.
Ending a Trip
Ending a trip takes you to a summary view of the trip. The user is able to go back in case they accidentally ended the trip. Also the trip auto ends after a few moments in the event the user does not want to input more taps.
Tax Overview & Export
As the user tracks miles, they are able to see their schedule C & other visualized data update in real time.
They can additionally export IRS complicit documents for deducting expenses.
Additional Features
Educate about tax code
Build ample support in different mediums to quickly educate new drivers about potential tax deductions and tips to look out for.
Automatically track miles
Using the integrated GPS in smartphones, track the users driven miles during work hours to deduct during taxes. Every mile is $0.56 back during your taxes so most drivers can deduct on average $10,000 per year!
Deduct Expenses
Users can take photos of their receipts and Mighty Mile will back up, tally, and organize their expenses for export at the end of the year.
Help during tax season
Mighty mile will export IRS compilcit documents for expenses write-offs & mileage logs for the entire year.
Process & Breakdowns
Complex ideas on paper work well for initial ideation. I usually use pen and paper to jot down quick visual ideas.
Sometimes initial ideas revolve a visual queue or an action. I usually step into Figma and finish off in After Effects for motion examples.
UX/ Wireframes
The cornerstone interaction feature of the mighty mile app. The swipe up is a perfect fit gig workers that need to move fast.
An early wireframe of the Login flow -> Dashboard -> Start trip flow
High fidelity screens of each tab in the hotbar. I was going to a brutalist look during this phase of discovery.
High fidelity flow of scanning a recpit and adding an expense to your account
Single screen events such as premium membership, friend invites, user account & a single page trip overview .
Motion Prototypes
Having a background in Visual Effects is useful when taking an idea to high fidelity prototypes. Down below I am using After effects to create a motion example for the cornerstone gesture of the UX of this app.
A interactive prototype in XCode built in SwiftUI and can compile on comptuer or even run on a phone!
The login screen with working AWS backend and user accounts.
Saving GPS data to phone in case the user quits or the app crashes before the trip is complete.
Thanks for looking!
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