Yocket Rewind — 2021🥳
Just like turning a page, another year has passed. But for us at Yocket, it was much more than turning a page. We changed the whole book!
Welcome to Yocket Rewind. More than knowing what songs or videos we watched last year, it’s a lot more thrilling for us to share with you how Yocket has evolved in 2021.
Buckle up cuz it’s showtime!
With big revamps, come bigger challenges!
First things first, our legacy website and app lacked finesse and structure. As the face of Yocket, we felt it should be more welcoming and engaging for you to explore. This called for a top-to-bottom restructuring of content, design, UI and UX. Though it was scary, we were inspired to create a brand new version.
And unanimously, we all just went ‘Challenge Accepted!’
The inception of Yocket Hydrogen
Yocket Hydrogen — the first of many upgrades to our product. Redefined with a warm tone of writing blended with functional designs and streamlined user flows, we brought forth Yocket’s first upgrade.
A little gossip: With types of candies taking over the android versions, we took a nerdy turn and decided to call our versions based on different chemical elements. Hence, Hydrogen! 🎓
Keeping the ideologies and our mission intact, we invested our time in augmenting our product’s foundation both in design and code.
So, let’s get into it.
CREST — Yocket’s design system
More than just creating incredible designs, we wanted to craft them with structure and consistency. This gave birth to our design system — CREST. Crest defines our brand colours, grid system, buttons, typography and everything necessary for a consistent product design. The designs based on Crest guidelines will be made live in the coming days.
Colour Palette
After completing the contrast tests and making subtle variations to our brand colour, we collated a colour palette that best reflects our product.
Iconography
It’s important to have a simple and minimalistic iconography. We surfed through the web and mined an icon pack that reflects our brand. Also, our designers didn’t miss out on a single instance to show off their design prowess by creating novelty icons.
Components
NO COMPROMISE ON COMPONENTS! We forgot our day-night cycles creating Yocket components from scratch. As Yocket is available both on the web and app, we came up with a scalable design system.
Content
We made sure the information is a lot more structured and easy to comprehend for you. With warm and a bit quirky at times, we wanted you to experience a Yocket that’s like a friendly senior/guide at every turn.
Yocket Features
Reimagining a product elicits recreating its features. As one of the aspirants’ beloved products, we wanted to upgrade our features with better user flows coupled with updated databases.
After a series of brainstorming sessions and relentless effort, our product team and dev team redesigned features with enhanced UI and UX. We’ve streamlined a whole lot of features and minimized the use of third-party services like Trello by developing new features.
Dashboard
A whole new Yocket feature that lets you access and tracks your study abroad journey easily. The dashboard combines the use of Trello cards, google drive and task reminders. We have created three main designs under this to give maximum freedom and accessibility to your study abroad process.
- Application Manager: A place for you to track and manage your university applications. (This design is not yet made live).
- Document Hub: Upload your necessary application documents for counsellor review and reference.
- Task: Add study abroad tasks and get reminders for the same with no hassle.
Connect
A feature that combines the legacy product’s Admit and Rejects and Similar Profiles. A sleek and fast design with well-defined hierarchical information to make finding similar profiles a walk in the park.
College Finder
The evolution of College Finder is the most anticipated for us. From a form field, College Finder has been turned into a step-by-step flow making the feature a lot more intriguing and engaging. We’ve also updated the algorithm along with 16k more programs to suggest more accurate results for you.
User Feed
Witness our very own social media feature getting a major facelift. Loaded with interactive elements such as Like, Reply, Hashtags and Share, UserFeed brings you a community of aspirants within reach.
Messages
Have seamless conversations with fellow aspirants with Yocket’s brand new messages feature. It has many interactive gesture-based design elements such as Reply, Add to task and more to enrich the experience for you.
Blogs
Readability and finesse. Two things we wanted to incorporate in our revamp of blogs. With a clean design, readable content spread and essential functionalities, our new blog design makes sure that you access all the necessary study abroad information with ease.
Latest UI enhancements and updates
In addition to major redesigning, we’ve done some itty bitty changes to improve our UI and add features. Here are a few of them
- Admit predictor: Find your chances of getting an admit to a University program.
- Gamification: Encouraging users to complete their profile to gain more benefits.
- Feed Activity: Traceback to your activities on user feed.
- Account settings: Change your personal information with ease.
- Refer and Earn: Refer Yocket Premium to friends and earn exciting gifts.
Codebase
We’ve re-built the Yocket application from the ground up. Everything from the Database, back-end APIs, cloud architecture, website front-end and mobile apps have been rewritten.
- Mobile apps
We recently moved to Flutter, the open-source framework from Google, that allows us to write code on a single codebase and natively compile it for Android and iOS. This makes development much faster (compared to maintaining two separate codebases for Android and iOS) while still giving the user a native mobile experience.
Google Pay, a popular app among Indian users, is built on Flutter.
- Website
In mid-2021 we upgraded our web application to use the latest JavaScript frameworks. Our backend is built on Express.js and our front-end uses Nuxt.js with Tailwind CSS. We are also optimizing our website for mobile browsers as a significant number of our users access the website from mobile browsers.
Things to look out for in 2022
As we enter 2022, we have planned a lot for both Yocket web and the app. Starting from design enhancements to feature upgradation, we are driven to make Yocket engaging and seamless for you. To achieve that, here are a few things we will be introducing in 2022
- Font — We found our font! We are fond of it! You’ll see it soon.
- Explore feature: An augmented and refined design and functional Explore section.
- Onboarding and engagement (Feed, connect and messages).
- Gamification of Profile completion — Incorporate fun elements and gamified triggers to urge you to complete profiles.
- Cloud infrastructure — Upgrading cloud infrastructure to handle up to 30k active users.
Talents out there, we’re HIRING!
We are in the process of expanding our Product, Engineering, Design and Flutter teams and are curious to take in exciting talents. If you are up for a fun and incredible ride and a fiend to solve problems with functional designs, find a role you’ll fit right in and apply!
Head to our career section — https://careers.yocket.com/jobs/Careers
In conclusion
We have done our best to roll out features and upgrades last year and we are in the works to do a lot more for you to make your study abroad journey a lot easier and more seamless.
Till then. Go exploring our website and app!🔭
