I made an app in less than a year from scratch
In 2020, COVID-19 disrupted everything in this world and most of us were quarantined in our homes. I was at home, bored and I was looking for something new I could sink my mind in during these challenging times. In December 2019, I was curious about Swift, Apple’s coding language. I read a bit about it but nothing emerged from that. I came back to it in March 2020. I started reading about the general principles: function declaration, variables, constants, using kits.
One day, I had to mail something because it couldn’t have been resolved over email. I was on my phone, trying to find an app to find a PO Box around me. The result was that there was one app available in France, but I just didn’t like it and it wasn’t up to date for a long time. The idea of creating such an app came to my mind and I googled something to find the raw data for those PO Boxes (the coordinates were all I needed in fact).
Learn to code
Now that I got the data, I had to learn how to make something in xCode (Apple’s software to code an app in Swift). I watched tutorials, read books about coding, and… made a lot of mistakes in xCode. I eventually had to buy a developer account to get to test my app on my phone.
Designing the app
Next to learning how to code, I made a quick prototype to have an idea of what I will code. This step helped me to have an idea of all the elements I needed (a map, a navigation bar, annotations). I just had to learn how to make those specific elements.
For the branding, it has been evolving as I was having new ideas, from a yellowish envelope to a colorful letter.
Getting organized
That might be one of the biggest elements of the project. “Even if you have a precise idea of your project in mind, write everything down so you can get back to it later”. That was something I told myself all the time.
As the project grew, I tracked the bugs, create epics and tasks for the project… everything was compiled in a Notion board so I can reference an object in a table and keep that logic I had in my mind
Test test test
Once I was confident enough in my work, I asked some friends and relatives to test my app and give me their feedback on everything. I did that 3 times in total, one to test the whole project, another one to try new features. And another one to confirm the choices I made. Each time, I tried to understand their feedbacks and why they would have said what they said.
What I learned from this experience
I learned a lot about my job as a designer while developing this app. It’s not always easy to understand why developers want specific information about the things we design. Now I know exactly what it is to go from a design project to a code project and what is needed to move easily from one to another. I will be careful in the future about how I name things and if what I am designing is technically feasible by the dev team I am working with.
I also know now what it takes to conduct such a project, and a clean, flawless organization method is the key to achieve great things. Of course, it was a small project on my own and a lot of things might be different in an actual company, but the glimpse I had with that project makes me excited about the endless possibilities.
