Design Story: Real Pixels

Great products come from solving your own needs. Step #1 — MVP

At Stanfy we are focused on creating beautiful apps for other companies. But it is even more exciting to work on something useful for the community of designers and developers out there.

We decided to address one particular designer’s trouble.

When you want to review your design (icon, screen, etc.) on an Android device, you should prepare images with the exact screen resolution of the device that you are using. Otherwise a standard image viewer or Dropbox app will scale the graphic and it will look blurred.

Our goal was:

“To give designers and development teams a simple way to view images in 100%-scale mode on any Android device.”

MVP — start from small and use it right away

We assumed that the easiest and most seamless way to transfer images from a designer’s laptop to an Android would be a shared Dropbox folder. So the initial workflow might look like this:

• Create a shared Dropbox folder and name it ”LookAt”
• Put your designs in LookAt folder in Dropbox
• Review images in their actual sizes

We decided to build just that. Basically our app consisted of two simple screens:

• Standard Dropbox login screen provided by Dropbox SDK
• Gallery with images in their actual sizes from predefined Dropbox folder “LookAt”

It appeared to work fine for our needs and we were using this app in our design workflow from day one.

Meet folders

MVP version worked pretty well with the predefined folder “LookAt”. But what about other folders in Dropbox? How would the designer organize his work by projects?

To answer these questions, we decided that we needed the ability to navigate through folders and view images from any Dropbox folder.

Now it looks much better. What else did we need to have before release? Well, we definitely needed a Login screen and a Logout feature somewhere.

Login and logout

So are we ready! Can we go to the public now?

Ummm, not yet… Oh, no! Yet another feature :)

One more feature… last one

Did we understand that we needed to get the app out of the building and to our users as quickly as possible? Yes we knew that. Still we couldn’t stop ourselves from adding one more useful feature.

And we did it. We add the ability to change the background colour for icons and small images.

Now we can prepare our app for public launch!

Last mile and launch

We knew that the app needs an icon, description, keywords and a simple web page. We created all of that and even managed to shot a simple promo video.

And here we are — meet Real Pixels in Google Play Market! https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.stanfy.lookat

What next?

Our roadmap includes dozens of features, but we need your input to decide which will be the most useful.

Some features that we are considering for the next releases:

• View images from local Android Library and SD cards.
• Improve speed of image loading and caching for seamless UX.
• Show file’s information: dimensions, file size, date of creation.
• Add Support of PSD file format
• Add support of live view from Photoshop canvas

Tools that we used during development

• Pivotal Tracker for stories, chores and everything.
• HipChat for real-time communication and file sharing and design previews.We set up integrations with Pivotal, Gitlab, Jenkins
• Dropbox for storing designs. Yes, we use Real Pixels for working on real pixels design as well :)
• GitLab for code collaboration and built-in wiki for notes.
• Jenkins and Stanfy Releases (our internal tool) for builds and internal release distribution.
• Methodology — agile, common sense and fun :)

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