iOS App Design & Development

Team: Meixuan Li, Navid Mamoon, Gautam Kapoor
My Role: Lead UI/UX Designer, Lead Front-End iOS Developer, User Researcher

Promotional Video

TikTok has surged in popularity over the past few years. This success and engagement is in large part due to their mainstream introduction of an infinite scrolling user interface. This user interface has also been adopted by other large players, such as Snapchat and Instagram, further demonstrating its effectiveness in engaging users. Learning that many people spending hours on these apps and feeling empty afterwards, we decided to take advantage of this infinite scrolling interface to help users find a different type of content: fun facts.

Idea validation

We sent out a survey to validate the value of our app.
- 89.5% of users suggested that boredom was a significant factor in spontaneous phone usage
- 90.5% of users reported using social media to curb their boredom
- 57.1% of users reported interests in learning new information/fun facts as an alternative and explained their reasons.

“I could expand my knowledge in the few minutes I have to kill time.”

“It would definitely educate me more than tiktok or other social media apps.”

“I am interested since I want to browse something meaningful when I am bored, instead of just killing the time.”

User Experience Testing

Prototype Courtesy: Meixuan Li

Our goals were to identify needed changes in the initial wireframes to make for a better user experience overall and determine which features are "must have" versus "want to have" from the user's perspective.

Prototype Testing

Prototype Courtesy: Meixuan Li

Our user tests focused on eight key functionalities of the app: creating an account, selecting categories (topics), setting up reminders, watching a topic specific feed, saving a fact, viewing another user’s profile, viewing tester’s personal profile, and creating a fact. Users were asked to complete each of the eight tasks as we recorded their experience and feedback.

We adjusted our prototype according to the summarized feedback below.
- Selecting categories interaction is confusing. Specifically, holding down larger categories to see subcategories was rarely accomplished.
- Users did not want to opt out of reminders, but rather wanted to be prompted to opt in if they are interested.
- Search icon for viewing topic specific feeds was misleading.

Prototype Courtesy: Meixuan Li

App Development

The entire app development duration was 1 month. I led front-end development and participated in back-end development, contributing 5000+ lines of code.

For non-user-created facts, the text is from Fun Fact API and the image is from Unsplash API. All data is saved and managed in Firebase.

Conclusion

We presented to the Capital One Technology Group and won a prize! We were also voted the top 3 favorite app!

Special thanks to Professor H, TA Ron, and Mentor Sohan! Thank you for all the great advice and help!

Lastly, thank you my team for all the hard work. Those late nights were well spent. Navid & Gautam, good luck on your next journey!