Qravity Developer’s Log, Episode I: Pre-Launch
Qravity is a platform for production and distribution of digital entertainment. It offers creatives from all over the world a unique opportunity to form decentralized teams, work on projects they feel passionate about, and earn royalties for helping complete those projects.
One of the main ideas behind Qravity is that creators should own, and profit from, their work. To accomplish this, the platform provides an online space for collaboration and flexible project management. This eliminates the obstacles indie creators often face when trying to conceive, develop, monetize, and distribute unique content, including, but not limited to financial issues, lack of experience and exposure, difficulties finding the right team members, and struggles getting the deserved recognition.
Qravity also has its own currency token, as well as a system of smart contracts based on the Ethereum blockchain that the platform uses to track the process of content creation, distribute royalties among team members, and Qravity-produced content directly to market.
Just like the projects it will soon host and distribute, Qravity itself has been under development for a long time. Thanks to our first-rate team of software engineers and designers, we’re nearly ready to launch our game-changing platform. In doing so, we’re aiming to transform the way the world creates, distributes, and consumes digital entertainment in a way that returns control and profits to the hands of the independent producers and creatives.
We’re proud to present the Qravity Developer’s Log to give you a deeper insight into the development of the next big thing in blockchain and entertainment. You will learn about the origins of Qravity, the discussions that inspired its features and design, and the technological development of the platform — all from the perspective of Qravity’s Development Department.
We hope this will give you a clear idea of the platform and its commitment to the beauty of creation while showing you how captivating creation can be, and how well we understand what it takes to design and develop a project from scratch.
Meetings and Discussions
The lifecycle of a web development project begins with a series of meetings and discussions. To make the best decisions for project development, developers must first understand their client’s goals.
Before we started developing Qravity, we collected as much information about it as we could. To understand the vision of David Brandstaetter and Sascha Dennstedt, Qravity’s founders, we gathered data related to their aspirations for the platform, and acquired a better understanding of Qravity’s target audience and the results we were expected to deliver, in terms of both functionality and design.
To gather this information, we asked David to fill out a number of briefs that contained general questions about his team’s hopes for Qravity and questions covering specific topics concerning user experience (UX) and the user interface (UI). Afterwards, we held a number of meetings based on his answers, discussing them further for clarification.
Having gathered enough information, we were able to start outlining project requirements and working on wireframes.
Composing Project Requirements
Project requirements consist of two major parts: functional and non-functional (technical) requirements. Functional requirements outline what each component of the system must do; non-functional requirements define the conditions necessary for successful system performance. Both must be written in a highly meticulous manner — comprehensive project requirements at this stage will help prevent future misunderstandings.
Neither client-side nor server-side developers can start working without a list of project requirements. They are usually composed alongside wireframe design because the two are interdependent: wireframes show the location of elements, and requirements define what the elements should do.
Olga Semusheva, the Project Manager of Qravity’s Development Department, wrote functional project requirements in close collaboration with David and other members of the Qravity Corporate Team. Meanwhile, Alexey Morgaev, the main back-end developer for Qravity, outlined technical specifications for the project.
Working on UX and Initial UI
Wireframes are the end result of UX design; they are a set of blueprints that outline the end product piece by piece. They represent the project in terms of functionality and usability, displaying all interactions users may possibly have with it. This is the wireframe of Qravity’s project detail page:
The proper approach to creating UX requires designers to collaborate closely not only with the client, but also with developers and quality assurance engineers (QA). Developers evaluate the wireframe in terms of how it will influence the performance and efficiency of implemented features; QAs determine whether it can cause any issues in real-life user interactions.
Once wireframes are ready, and the client has approved them, designers can start preparing the the UI layout in a manner that optimizes UX, making products that are both pleasant to look at and comfortable to use.
In terms of development, UX is the object of interest for server-side developers because it helps them understand what sort of features they need to implement for the whole project to work properly. Client-side developers, on the other hand, make more use of the UI/UX combination, translating the more or less static design images into functional websites, landing pages, and mobile applications.
Because UI/UX is such an interesting and wide-ranging topic, we will dedicate a separate log to it. You will gain insight into the process of designing Qravity, including the choices that designers made and specifics about designer-client-developer cooperation.
Structuring Qravity and Starting Development
Having acquired an in-depth understanding of the platform and its purposes, our developers began coding. In upcoming episodes of the Qravity Developer’s Log, you will learn how they built the project’s architecture and elements; you will also discover how each of the platform’s elements work together to form the wealth of opportunities that Qravity offers.
