The Ripple* Effect
As the Paris 2024 Olympics starts today, memories of our first passion project (Ripple Sports* — London Olympics 2012) are revived. Here’s a blurb about the app that we designed & built. This app got SO good, it won a UX design award, beating out companies like Flipkart, Amazon at USID 2012 competition. We even got ranked as a top 3 must-have app by the Windows Store (remember those?). This project was equal parts passion, late nights fueled by instant ramen, and laughter-filled geek out sessions.
🧚It started with an idea
We were fresh out of college, bloated with pure arrogance and unchecked ignorance with a desperate need to change the world for better and FAST. We saw the Olympics as our big opportunity.
👯Natural team-up
Alap Shah, Arjav Dave & Niral Desai, a team united with shared passion for this idea. All we wanted to do was build a solution never seen, heard, imagined before, yet loved and cherished by the olympic enthusiasts.
🎩Pushing boundaries!
Remember, this was the iPhone4 era with all kinds of tech limitations. This was a time before design systems, tokens, components, Figma, Sketch or even clear standards for OSes!! We came up with a bold and original design for this app
• A personalised approach to help people navigate, socialize, keep track of events, scores and much more.
• Unique data-visualization by augmented & layered information on custom made maps for olympics village.
• We introduced interactions like shake to pop layer options, edge swipes, long/forced touch and more, way before it became a common standard.
And yes, we used macromedia Flash to prototype most of it to test. And sometimes even made pretend-interaction videos to create pre-release ads. Credits to friends who helped us throughout (Like recording the narration for our video).
🚀The build!
We were heavily limited by technology but kudos to Arjav who was to date the legendary tech guys ever with passion for design and experimentation. There were no free APIs available to get live scores. But that was not going to stop us! Niral sat day and night watching every single olympics event and updated scores for our users. Solo sourced vs crowd sourced at epic level. In the end, it was an absolute euphoria to have real users who loved our product.
🥇“Citius, Altius, Fortius–Communiter” (a thoughtful 2024 updated moto)
As the Olympics was short lived, so was this app. But this gave birth to our never ending thirst for building meaningful products. Although the struggle continues on the “how to make money” part as creatives. Hats off to all the creatives in the world who never stop building beautiful products no matter what! Check out the teaser video (warning: may cause uncontrollable nostalgia for 2012)
