We all know the common joke “ a man walked into a bar” So you would think that releasing another photo sharing app in an ocean of other apps alike would be madness no?
Apparently we didn’t think so! Today we are releasing Happy, a photo-sharing app, but without all the functions that are so familiar to this style of app. There are no profiles, followers, like buttons, comment spaces, just a good old smile or a grumpy trash and flag!
It’s an experiment and we know it, we didn’t sit in our office contemplating its massive future acquisition, nor hopefully its complete demise! We just thought, “Hey what happens if a stranger smiles at you, or vice versa, like in the street on a sunny day! C’mon surely we have all had this experience? How can we make an app from that?”
That was about it, it came about from a simple curiosity, which leads us down a path, a very long path if we can be honest to try something new.
The concept is certainly new but more so we decided to have some fun with the design and this is the outcome.
We hope you like it, we hope it makes you happy and in turn makes others happy.
Download Happy by September Projects and lets start making the world happy one smile at a time.
Now for the basic function and use:
Happy is anonymous, the photo has a location tag (if you allow location!), once you send your happy its sent to another user somewhere in the world randomly. This is determined by our server, nothing to do with us! If the user smiles at your lovely picture, then it starts its travel, a happy journey, as we like to call it. So in turn its lifeline begins traveling all around the world from one user to another. So imagine the possibilities if the image is really successful?
This part is the game, the more creative the image or video the more smiles it should evoke and travel the furthest.
At the same time we realize that not everyone wants to share their own happy moments but more observe others. Fair enough! So check out the explore button and let the app show you images from all over the world giving you the chance to see really unique images from strangers.
In Happy app we decided to give the location geo tag the most room to be explored. Though you do not know the author of the photo, you can see its approximate location within a few km radiuses. So explore your strangers’ world and find all the small little functions that we have built in the app to allow you to play around.
That’s about a short summary of our Happy app, below we have outlined more info on our process which may be interesting if that’s your thing, we certainly found it very challenging and along the way had a pretty interesting time creating it.
So for more in-depth info read below:
A year ago we set two rules for this app.
- The app is not only anonymous, but it should encourage people to leave their ego completely behind.
- Happy has to contain as little language as possible. No labels, no descriptions and no chat.
Setting additional design rules is generally a bad idea. As we understand design as a way of solving problems, it seemed ridiculous to add more problems than basic user experience and usability. And in the end, these rules makes Happy special and thanks to them some general questions popped up in the process.
Anonymity as part of an experience
We wanted to create an app, which allows people to share their happy moments with another user, but letting the picture speak for itself. However happiness is tricky and subjective.
A bit of research on social networks and hashtags shows clearly, that all the posts connected with happy show a subjective point of view of the author. They are happy because they bought new fancy shoes, or they are on a boat on a sunny day etc. Social networks are usually a deep well of narcissism and selfishness thriving and existing on a return of likes and responses. Does this truly make the author a happier person? Because they have a thousand likes?
As we were working on the concept for Happy, it became obvious, that if we don’t want to create selfie-ego-pumping app, we have to go anonymous. Lets give our ego a break and be creative to make someone else smile or step into a strangers life just for a moment.
Now anonymous start-ups are booming and this feature is really trending. But a year ago there was just one significant app to observe and that was Rando by @ustwo (currently known more for their excellent game Monument Valley). Rando was truly a random sharing app but we wanted to go further to still create a network and really think hard about how people will share their happy moments and still feel some gratification that they have touched someone or have shared something with a stranger.
Anonymity is a strong concept and a complicated feature and we are just scratching the surface. Once we started solving the problems with Happy, we found out, that many patterns usually used in apps are ridiculous. For example: do we really have to register ourselves in every simple app and service?
Is it really so necessary to give access to our personal data to every startup and company in the world?
Is it really so necessary to give access to our personal data to every startup and company in the world? Why, when we already giving’ them an opportunity to access our phones via an app?
Happy is not interested in any personal data. We are using your Apple UUID for backup and identification of the app copy, but we don’t need your e-mail, password and other info. Only Apple keeps your personal data and we don’t have any access to them.
Anonymity and privacy is and will be huge phenomena in the future. People are starting to move away from their profile and are protecting their privacy more and more, so as a feature this became very important, one that we are sure to be using in our next app.
No language
As we started designing Happy, we had the idea of not using any language in UI. We took the challenge and spend a lot of time solving absolutely incredible problem.
All the modern interface patterns are built on language, especially iOS7 that added text layer on top of the design system and labels with text buttons, which has much higher position in hierarchy of elements than icons and artworks. When you are designing for mobile device, following patterns and keeping rules is a huge part of the process, because you can’t afford to get people lost in your app. A good app is immersive, clear and understandable.
It didn’t look like it would be a big issue in the beginning, but it started to get more and more complicated as you start applying rules for using and new features. For example: How to explain how it works?
How to encourage the user to be active to receive a happy post?
How to label sections or to create tutorials?
In short Happy is anonymous and language-free so we are really experimenting with how people will react and use this app. We are testing Happy silently in App Store for a few weeks and it looks like people enjoy it. A few hundreds of users shared almost thousands of photos. And good ones! Basically it works. But naturally: almost no one shared video and some people are obviously confused with some features. So we decide to go back and address some of the rules we made for ourselves and try to make it a little more friendly and dynamic.
We spent lot of time figuring out what is possible in app design and function. We removed tons of features and control elements from Happy and in the end we hope, this is a pure and divergent app, one that is interesting to use and will keep the users intrigued. So, the easier part is done, now it’s up to you to show us how far this can go.
Smile and the world will smile with you.
