One day, one of my friends was feeling little low and needed a dose of Serotonin or dopamine, a happiness hormone. He started browsing for apps on the Play Store which display motivational quotes and liners from the famous people and movie/tv series. Based on the download counts and good reviews, he downloaded some of them. However, when he looked at all the apps he could not find one which had a good user experience as well as quality content. Being a Product Designer, I took this up as a challenge and decided to design and develop an application that will have a good user experience with quality content.
A good logo always transcends the right message about the company and its area of functionality. For this project, I wanted to design a simple logo without any convoluted curves or shadows.
I sketched many ideas on the paper and finally decided something which was intuitive and simple. As our focus was on displaying quality quotes, I used the word Q inside the quotation marks with closing quotation mark on the right bottom.
It represents Quality Quotes.
We started learning about our competitors. We searched for similar applications on Play Store. There was a plethora of applications available doing the same thing we were planning to do. We filtered some of the applications with their download count and started downloading them. After complete analysis, some of the important issues we found which required immediate attention were:
These issues resulted in decreased retention rate, more uninstalls and an unhappy user base.
One thing was clear after competitive analysis that there is a huge demand for an application that can motivate, inspire and humor people through its quality quotes and liners.
But the problem with the current applications was —
Lack of good user experience and quality of content.
At this point of time, we had a clear definition of the problem we were planning to solve. So we started brainstorming sessions. We discussed all kind of solutions which can address the problem. Some of the points came out from these discussions were:
“Create a database of quality quotes and liners from famous people.”
“Design simple yet elegant interface which respects user’s need.”
“Incorporate advertisements in the design without distracting user’s attention and improving app efficiency.”
With above points in mind, we started working on the designs. I conducted many design studios with the team and sketched various ideas on the paper. After continuous iterations, we decided to have a clean card view covering most of the mobile screen space having one quote on it at a time. This would help users to keep their attention on the content all the time.
One interesting feature that we added was a spinner. It allows users to see random quotes. Conventionally, to read a quote, users have to select a particular author or tag from the navigation which would show all the quotes as selected and through swiping right/left or top/bottom they would see all the quotes. To select a different option, they have to follow the same steps again. To reduce this friction we introduced spinner concept which would allow users to see random quotes on a single click.
Once all the screens were finalized on the paper, I converted them into high fidelity wireframes in the photoshop. Some of them are:
To remove all kind of distractions, I selected a color palette with only 4 colors to make the interface simple and clear.
I used Josefin Sans for quotes to give an elegant look and Cabin for other text for high legibility and readability.
Icons were used are:
Tools used for the Project:
Technology used for the Project
Once the app is on the play store, I will be continuously tracking its growth using some metrics — Number of downloads, uninstalls, retention rate, and session duration etc.
Along with this, I will be working on few enhancements like:
Before starting this side project, I always thought I wouldn’t be able to start it as I don’t have spare time. But, once I took this challenge I realized that I have plenty of time to not only work on side projects but other activities as well. Through this project I realized that — time is abundant, only you are not using it properly.
Being a designer, manager, and marketer for the project I learned many things like:
Overall, it was a great learning experience and I would highly recommend everyone to take at least one side project a year.
