Onna
August 2021 arrived with a seven-week challenge to the ADA. It took seven weeks for us to do the whole process of thinking about a theme, idea, designing, and finally making a version of the MPV app to present to our Academy and Apple staff from different countries.
It all started with a new group of people I hadn’t worked with before, and to my surprise, I was the only dev in the group and the other four were designers, and…we were all women. The only female-only group.
The general theme was: help, and in the ideation process, it is recommended to go with an open mind and see what we all have in common to arrive at an issue that everyone feels comfortable and excited to work on. Of course, we all had a common theme, but in the beginning, no one wanted to speak so as not to influence the others. But at a certain point in this process, I ended up raising this issue and all the others confessed that they were thinking the same:
Our topic had to be about: Women
We arrive at the following Big Idea, Essential Question, and Challenge:
And from the experience of previous groups, there was the fear of more “hot” conflicts of ideas perhaps… but I must confess that our group was very perfect! We were able to connect a lot with the ideas and we always talked until we got to a point where everyone was happy. And I must remember that there were FOUR DESIGNERS on the team, that is, they had to reach a consensus on the style of the illustrations. But looking at it now, I think this might have been one of our greatest strengths, as our app design was AMAZING! — And it’s not just me and the girls on my team talking 😜, but see for yourselves:
But ok, the design was the strongest point, but a Mini Challenge isn’t just about design. We would have to program and make at least one MVP to show in the presentation, and there was only one dev that didn’t have experience with Swift or other Apple technologies, so it would be a challenge to try to learn the specifics of the language and have to do all the MVP alone.
However, to my happiness, all the girls showed interest in learning to program, but it took 3 weeks to do all the programming part, and we hadn’t finished everything related to design. So we prefer to leave everything good before going to the app.
In the app I set up the initial architecture, showing and explaining everything to them, I did the Design System part, which was basically some classes to define fonts, font sizes, and colors that we would have available in our app. This would make the code easier to use and give consistency.
We also had to decide how we would record the information. At first, we only wanted to use Apple technologies, so it would have only login with Apple, and we thought about using CloudKit. But we had never used it, and as I have a Back-End background, I preferred to leave this part to myself, because it would be too much for the girls to try to learn Front and Back at once.
I did the initial architecture, navigation (since we would be using something out of the ordinary like swipe for that), and the OnBoarding pages — so the girls would have models to follow and of course, they could always ask me. Then I went to make the API. I did it in Dotnet core 5 with C# (I took an example architecture with my husband 💜), I used Postgres as a database, I did all the modeling with the Entity Framework, I created the default CRUD methods for all models and went to Heroku ( which by the way was a super tip from our dear mentor Bruno Pastre), where you can practically upload anything that runs on a docker for free!
Meanwhile, the girls were making the app screens. We used SwiftUI and we used Github through GitKraken, I’ve always been guiding them and so we didn’t have merge problems (apart from what Xcode itself generates when merging, but I quickly got the hang of how to solve 😉).
When all the screens were ready and the API was also ready and published, I started connecting the screens with the API while the girls were preparing the presentation. I must say that they did an AWESOME job with the presentation, I totally trusted them in this regard, and in return, they trusted me to finish the MVP and make it available on testflight… of course, there are some bugs, but we managed to deliver what we wanted and we were very happy thereby.
For the future, we’ll try to fix the bugs and make a version that can actually be made available in the store 🙃
And for the girls from Onna’s group, I just wanted to say my thanks and reinforce how amazing they were in this project, not only as designers but also as devs! I loved working with you all and I know I will hear your name a lot in the future on giant projects!! (Broona, I’ll visit you in NY, wait for me!)
