How we challenged ourselves and made an iPhone app in one month
Let’s say hello to the Cryptosaur
as the title says, Cryptosaur is an iOS cryptocurrency app. In short, the Cryptosaur is a simple list of all important cryptocurrencies and live prices from multiple exchanges around the globe.
What was the motivation to create Cryptosaur?
At first, we wanted to create an app that shows prices in a simple way. Then what we wanted is to create an app in which we will try new libraries like Lottie (it’s a library for animations). And why we decide to do so? We think that there should always be a space to learn and improve our skills, but that’s not all that this app brings for us. We have new app that we could show to our clients. If the app will have enough users, we could improve it and create more important features that will be attractive for the crypto community.
And of course, I mustn’t forget to say that we have iOS trainee program so this project was ideal for our trainees to learn.
In which way we wanted to be different
Because we had only one month, we knew that we will be better in design because technical features are more time consuming to develop. We did our research and prepared some concepts of visual style. At first, we defined who is our target group. After team brainstorm, we defined our target group as a “user who is checking actual prices and does not need some special indicators, just wants to see actual price in $”. It could be ideal solution for journalists or someone who is investing long term or someone who checks prices just because he wants to do so. After consultation with the development team, we have selected ideal style that would be implementable in a short period of time. So the process of creation have started.
What barriers we met
How I said before, deadline. It was a challenge for all people in the team, from our experience, we knew that this project couldn’t be exception and we will have to create a plan like we do in every project. Next problem was that we wanted to use some 3rd party library for showing charts in card style (image showcase), but we didn’t find a library that met our needs, so our development team had to write our own. You must always expect something that will extend development time. You can solve it in two ways. First, engage more developers from other teams to solve it or second, give developers more time to solve it. Which way you choose depends on both, team and situation. So in our case, we selected second way because we had in our plan some dedicated time for these situations. It was a good choice.
Conclusion
If you want to create something that people use, the simplest way is to create something that solves people’s problem. In our case, the problem is solved by many apps, but we are more targeting people that want to see simple data in a nicer coat — this is where our competition is usually weak. So that was our opportunity to try it. It is important to have reason for what you do. If Cryptosaur does not attract enough users, it was a good experience for our designers, developers and managers, it was a one month investment to education. If it will get its user base, good for us.
Feel free to download the Cryptosaur or share your opinion and experience in the comments below.
See you soon, NETVOR team.
