context

As a solo developer, I launched an iOS app to help people keep in touch with the friends and family they care about the most. The app reminds you when you haven't talked to someone in a while, and you can call or text directly from the app. I designed and developed KIT from scratch in 2017.

reflections & learnings

I loved building something from scratch and working on my product, design, and development knowledge.

I started with user research and basic wireframe flows, then iterated, iterated, and iterated. Here are a few of the questions I faced and answered along the way.

• product: who are my different personas? what does my MVP look like and what's my timeline? what metrics do I track?
• design: what are best practices for designing a mobile-first experience? how do I account for multiple screen sizes? what is my color palette? how do I make an app icon and splash screen?
• development: how do I ensure performance for users with 1000+ contacts? how do I implement push notifications? how the heck do I deploy this to the iOS app store?

Looking back, there were a lot of things I could have done better. Technically, the UI worked, but it wasn't good enough to make it worth the effort over defaults such as simply relying on memory.

I could've improved on what I built by doing more thinking through the user journey and doing far more user research and usability testing.

responsibilities

Solo Mobile App Designer and Developer

key technologies used

React Native, RealmJS, Moment.js

link to repo

Github