Another story of your own project or “Motivate me!”
This publication is the story of the development of my own little project from the inception of the idea to the first working version posted on Google Play, which I tried to dilute with useful tips. Dedicated to everyone who (like myself) someone else's example is able to inspire their own, albeit small feats.
The history of my project does not begin with an idea, but with strong motivation - from the case because of which I wanted to release my own project at all costs. The old friend, a former classmate who asked me to write a small Android application for him several months ago, was to blame (Sanya, if you read this, thank you very much!). A couple of weeks - and the application is laid out, money is received, but there was an unpleasant aftertaste on my soul. We studied together, graduated together, I wasn’t particularly stupid, but he is trying to develop and promote his projects, and I spend time on others. Why? After weighing the pros and cons, I came to the conclusion that I was also capable of something and decided to prove it in practice (at least to myself).
The decision to start our own project was made - half the job was done, it remains only to generate the idea and implement it (nothing). I spent about 4 hours the next evening to understand what exactly I would do. The conditions were set quite obvious - the project should be simple (so that you can pull it alone and have enough energy up to the end) and at least potentially useful to people (explain to me why write an application that nobody needs?). As usual, for all the hours of intensive deliberation, not a single bright thought visited me, but as soon as I went to bed, the idea came up with a bunch of details and even a way to monetize. It was good that the notebook was at hand, and I overpowered myself and made the necessary notes (otherwise in the morning nothing would have been guaranteed).
So drum roll! A mobile application for showing motivating quotes after a certain period of time! Yes, nothing fundamentally new - all the same quotes from motivating publics and smart books. But if you think about it, what is the problem of motivating groups in social networks? In my opinion, it is precisely in the fact that they are on social networks. Instead of getting a portion of motivation and getting down to business, the subscriber continues to leaf through the group or leaves for another and starts watching photos of the seals. Not very conducive to achieving the goal, right? But what if you make the quotes come in once every half an hour / hour and prevent the user from flipping through one quote after another? Maybe something will turn out.
Well, there is an idea and it is recognized as potentially not worthless. You need to get down to business as quickly as possible until you get over it. On this occasion, even someone came up with a 72-hour rule . It is difficult to speak about its fairness, but it has been verified on my own experience - the longer you put off your idea, the less likely it is to start doing something (not to mention bringing it to an end).
The next step is the definition of requirements and the preparation of those. tasks. It may seem to someone that compiling t.z. - an extra convention when you are alone and realize your own idea. But in fact, this is a landmark that will help more or less adequately build the architecture of the application and will not let go into the endless improvement of the project. Yes, when you are working on someone else's project, the new requirements and ideas coming from the customer are simply annoying. But when working on your own application, I want to make it ideal - fix it here, rework it, and if you don’t stop it in time, you won’t release any application. So, tame your internal perfectionist, and may that help you.
For my project, I identified the following requirements:
I limited myself to this set of requirements. Then it seemed quite enough, but now it seems necessary to add an update to the local quotation base so that without connecting to the Internet the user can see the most recent quotes. But, as I said above, you can not give free rein to the internal perfectionist. Therefore, this Wishlist remained for the next version (like many others).
Its those. I will not post the task here in order to save space.
In the next step, I took up the most difficult (for me) problem - design. About people who have hearing problems say "the bear has stepped on his foot." I don’t know who and what has stepped on me, but I categorically do not know how to develop designs. The only hope was for the fashionable minimalism and flat design.
The right Color Scheme service helped to choose the right colors (I suspect that you can find a bunch of analogues if you want). It not only helps to choose colors according to the main selected color, but also shows a couple of examples of website design in the selected color scheme. Well, according to the finished site design, it is not a problem to draw something similar for a mobile application. The icons were either borrowed from Bootstrap or made in a minimalist style. And, of course, I did not disdain the advice that a once familiar designer gave. It sounds simple: “Never play with fonts! Nothing betrays the inexperience of a designer so much as an incorrectly selected font. ”
Also, do not forget that people will use your application and it should not only look beautiful, but also be convenient and understandable to use. It is strongly recommended to download and see the top applications from google play, the closest analogues of your brainchild (if any) and see how this or that functionality is designed. It is not necessary to repeat other people's ideas, the main thing is to do no worse than that of colleagues in the workshop.
The most common mistakes in this regard are the addition of turning pages and swiping without the slightest hint that this functionality is provided in your application. That is, the user goes to a screen where you can turn pages, but does not see a hint of it - a simple screen with text, pictures, controls. How should he guess that he is required to make a “flipping” gesture? For a long time there are libraries that add page indicators in a wide variety of views, in the worst case, you can simply defiantly with animation flip from the nth page to the first, but, nevertheless, many simply ignore this aspect.
If you have a page-turning screen, this must be explicitly specified. If you add the ability to delete entries by swiping, describe it. If it is not visible on any of the devices that the screen can be scrolled from top to bottom, think about how to solve this problem. Your users are not you, they have not thought about the application for several months and have not tested it. In the end, remember Murphy’s law: “If there are two ways to do something, one of which leads to disaster, then someone will choose this method.”
In terms of visual design, here is what I ended up with:
Of course, girls do not faint from an overabundance of feelings, and no one asks for autographs, but at least they do not hurt their eyes. Personally, I am satisfied.
Next came the long and completely standard development process, which does not make sense to describe in detail. I will mention only a couple of points.
Firstly, the minimum supported version of android. I followed the herd instinct and decided that my project would support all android devices starting from version 2.3. Because of this, I had to solve a few additional problems (in my case, not so many, but in large projects difficulties can be much more serious). Is the complexity of the project (and therefore the time of its development, the weight of the application due to the support of the libraries) worth the additional users that we can attract? It’s not for me to decide, but just for information: at the moment there are about 5.6% of active users with android 2.3.3 - 2.3.7, and this number is decreasing every month ( proof ).
Secondly, the use of third-party libraries. Do not reinvent the wheel, do not write your own implementation of ready-made functionality out of pure interest. It may happen that after such a small subtask, you simply run out of steam and don’t finish the project (and in this case, this is our main task). Google, use ready-made libraries, if any, borrow code from open-source projects (not mindless of course). Do everything to reduce development time. It is also worth doing with commercial innovative development. The faster you show your development to the public (even if it’s a semi-working prototype), the quicker you will get feedback and see if anyone is interested in your project (read: spend less money on unpromising development).
In parallel with the development, I needed someone to compose a database of motivating quotes. I tried to contact fl.ru for help. He set the task in the style of “collecting 500 quotes for each topic, the source is not important, discard completely jammed phrases”. I reasoned that 500 quotes on each topic would be more than enough to start (what to do next is the tenth question), if it’s possible to find 500 DIFFERENT motivating quotes on the net. The price tags that were put up by the locals simply pleased - from 1,000 rubles to 20,000 rubles. Moreover, half of the respondents immediately merged somewhere and did not answer any questions.
Soundly judging that for a simple job — turning over public pages on VKontakte and reading quotes (most of the country's population does this for free), you can take some schoolchildren / first-year student for a much lower price, I decided to refuse gentlemen freelancers. Since then, I have no regrets about it. I received the quotes, paid a symbolic amount, and I and the student are happy as elephants.
Nevertheless, I kept a couple of contacts with the most interesting offers in case I would seriously develop the project and people with sufficient qualifications would be needed.
Monetization is simple. It is doubtful that someone would dare to give their hard-earned money for something resembling a banal quote book. Therefore, there is only one way out - advertising. The only acceptable for my application (try to cash in on ads in an application that is almost always closed) and the least annoying way to introduce ads is viewing bonuses. The user is sorely lacking something in the application, and in order to get it, you need to either wait a few hours or watch a commercial and get what you want instantly. Typically, the user prefers the second method. And since he himself decided that he was ready to watch an advertisement for the bonus, it didn’t annoy him so much.
It is not difficult to guess that in my case, the user should receive impressions of quotes for viewing ads. I watched the video - you can see 8 motivating quotes. I didn’t watch the video - you can see only one quote per day.
In terms of an ad provider, I first looked at Appodeal . The system is interesting (somewhere in the neighborhood on the hub there was an article about ways to increase profits), and the prospect of increasing profits by itself cannot but rejoice. Unfortunately, as it turned out during the start of development, the ability to display video ads has not yet been added to Appodeal. This feature was later added, but it is rumored that there are problems with paying for small traffic on this platform. Therefore, until better times, AdColony was integrated into the application .
I did the testing myself, and toward the end of the development, a handful of selected friends joined me.
First of all, I was interested in how people would start using my application, whether they would have questions or complications. The main thing here is to remember the purpose for which you give the application for testing. If at least 3 out of 5 respondents make the same mistake when using the application, then this is a mistake of the developer, not the user. This stage was completed without problems.
But when testing the functionality, it turned out that I didn’t understand very well some of the features of the platform, which is why the application turned into a guessing game: quotes either came or went. In this state, the project could not be left, so we had to eliminate the gaps and correct errors as soon as possible.
The torment of development is over, the application has already been uploaded to Google Play for several days. I have not yet been engaged in promotion, so I can not boast of financial success and a bunch of downloads. However, in addition to the financial component, there is another profit from the project that I have already received.
First of all, no matter how trite it may sound, this is experience. I do not mean the experience of solving technical problems (although it certainly was), but the experience of independent development. For a couple of months I had to go to several simplified roles of PM'a, designer, employer and content manager. After some time, I will have the first experience in promoting the product. Even if you are not going to leave the employer and start your own business, this experience will help to better understand all the processes that occur during the development of the project. At least you will be more tolerant of changing requirements and introducing a new design.
Secondly, you get one more application in your portfolio (and if it is the first in your portfolio, then there’s nothing to talk about). Yes, it may not be very difficult and unsuccessful in terms of attracting users and money, but it is completely yours. The idea, design, code - the project from start to finish is implemented by you. If you did this, then you, at least slightly, are technically savvy. If you have a good design and the application is convenient to use, then you can not only pass on the mock-ups of the designer, but also consult on how best to add this or that detail (I still remember the unsuccessful warriors in the style of "- It won’t work, either it doesn’t fit, or it will be too shallow! -Just do it, but we'll see. "). And finally, if you have implemented a project without motivation in the form of money, then what can you create for money?
And of course, you will enjoy realizing that you have done something completely on your own. Yes, many have projects carried out in a team, or without a team, but with a customer and financing. But the implementation of your own project, going through all stages of development, the realization that “I wanted, invented and implemented”, gives a completely different feeling than hired work.
I have everything, thanks for reading this long post. I hope at least someone found it useful. If anyone would be interested, I will supplement it later with experiments promoting their results.
The history of my project does not begin with an idea, but with strong motivation - from the case because of which I wanted to release my own project at all costs. The old friend, a former classmate who asked me to write a small Android application for him several months ago, was to blame (Sanya, if you read this, thank you very much!). A couple of weeks - and the application is laid out, money is received, but there was an unpleasant aftertaste on my soul. We studied together, graduated together, I wasn’t particularly stupid, but he is trying to develop and promote his projects, and I spend time on others. Why? After weighing the pros and cons, I came to the conclusion that I was also capable of something and decided to prove it in practice (at least to myself).
The decision to start our own project was made - half the job was done, it remains only to generate the idea and implement it (nothing). I spent about 4 hours the next evening to understand what exactly I would do. The conditions were set quite obvious - the project should be simple (so that you can pull it alone and have enough energy up to the end) and at least potentially useful to people (explain to me why write an application that nobody needs?). As usual, for all the hours of intensive deliberation, not a single bright thought visited me, but as soon as I went to bed, the idea came up with a bunch of details and even a way to monetize. It was good that the notebook was at hand, and I overpowered myself and made the necessary notes (otherwise in the morning nothing would have been guaranteed).
So drum roll! A mobile application for showing motivating quotes after a certain period of time! Yes, nothing fundamentally new - all the same quotes from motivating publics and smart books. But if you think about it, what is the problem of motivating groups in social networks? In my opinion, it is precisely in the fact that they are on social networks. Instead of getting a portion of motivation and getting down to business, the subscriber continues to leaf through the group or leaves for another and starts watching photos of the seals. Not very conducive to achieving the goal, right? But what if you make the quotes come in once every half an hour / hour and prevent the user from flipping through one quote after another? Maybe something will turn out.
Well, there is an idea and it is recognized as potentially not worthless. You need to get down to business as quickly as possible until you get over it. On this occasion, even someone came up with a 72-hour rule . It is difficult to speak about its fairness, but it has been verified on my own experience - the longer you put off your idea, the less likely it is to start doing something (not to mention bringing it to an end).
The next step is the definition of requirements and the preparation of those. tasks. It may seem to someone that compiling t.z. - an extra convention when you are alone and realize your own idea. But in fact, this is a landmark that will help more or less adequately build the architecture of the application and will not let go into the endless improvement of the project. Yes, when you are working on someone else's project, the new requirements and ideas coming from the customer are simply annoying. But when working on your own application, I want to make it ideal - fix it here, rework it, and if you don’t stop it in time, you won’t release any application. So, tame your internal perfectionist, and may that help you.
For my project, I identified the following requirements:
- Ability to choose the time interval in which quotes will appear and the delay between two appearances. It is doubtful that someone can be positively motivated by waking up with a quote like “Time does not like to be wasted”;
- Ability to choose quotation topics. Yandex Wordstat showed that the most popular motivation for success, self-development, sports and weight loss. It is very likely that the user will be interested in only one of the topics indicated, so why should he show everything? True, the reality turned out to be such that it was necessary to combine success and self-development in one topic, and sports and weight loss in another. The fault is the inability to clearly distinguish between topics and the small number of quotes that come across the network;
- Ability to add your own quotes. I suspect that I am not able to find all possible quotes. And some of those that I find and drop, considering it uninteresting, may be useful to other people. Adding your own quotes should correct this situation, as well as extend the life of the project, if I stop monitoring quotes;
- Some citations should be stored on the user's device, and some on the server. Thus, the application can be used without an Internet connection, and in order to deliver a new set of quotes to the user, you do not need to release an update.
I limited myself to this set of requirements. Then it seemed quite enough, but now it seems necessary to add an update to the local quotation base so that without connecting to the Internet the user can see the most recent quotes. But, as I said above, you can not give free rein to the internal perfectionist. Therefore, this Wishlist remained for the next version (like many others).
Its those. I will not post the task here in order to save space.
In the next step, I took up the most difficult (for me) problem - design. About people who have hearing problems say "the bear has stepped on his foot." I don’t know who and what has stepped on me, but I categorically do not know how to develop designs. The only hope was for the fashionable minimalism and flat design.
The right Color Scheme service helped to choose the right colors (I suspect that you can find a bunch of analogues if you want). It not only helps to choose colors according to the main selected color, but also shows a couple of examples of website design in the selected color scheme. Well, according to the finished site design, it is not a problem to draw something similar for a mobile application. The icons were either borrowed from Bootstrap or made in a minimalist style. And, of course, I did not disdain the advice that a once familiar designer gave. It sounds simple: “Never play with fonts! Nothing betrays the inexperience of a designer so much as an incorrectly selected font. ”
Also, do not forget that people will use your application and it should not only look beautiful, but also be convenient and understandable to use. It is strongly recommended to download and see the top applications from google play, the closest analogues of your brainchild (if any) and see how this or that functionality is designed. It is not necessary to repeat other people's ideas, the main thing is to do no worse than that of colleagues in the workshop.
The most common mistakes in this regard are the addition of turning pages and swiping without the slightest hint that this functionality is provided in your application. That is, the user goes to a screen where you can turn pages, but does not see a hint of it - a simple screen with text, pictures, controls. How should he guess that he is required to make a “flipping” gesture? For a long time there are libraries that add page indicators in a wide variety of views, in the worst case, you can simply defiantly with animation flip from the nth page to the first, but, nevertheless, many simply ignore this aspect.
If you have a page-turning screen, this must be explicitly specified. If you add the ability to delete entries by swiping, describe it. If it is not visible on any of the devices that the screen can be scrolled from top to bottom, think about how to solve this problem. Your users are not you, they have not thought about the application for several months and have not tested it. In the end, remember Murphy’s law: “If there are two ways to do something, one of which leads to disaster, then someone will choose this method.”
In terms of visual design, here is what I ended up with:
 |  |
Of course, girls do not faint from an overabundance of feelings, and no one asks for autographs, but at least they do not hurt their eyes. Personally, I am satisfied.
Next came the long and completely standard development process, which does not make sense to describe in detail. I will mention only a couple of points.
Firstly, the minimum supported version of android. I followed the herd instinct and decided that my project would support all android devices starting from version 2.3. Because of this, I had to solve a few additional problems (in my case, not so many, but in large projects difficulties can be much more serious). Is the complexity of the project (and therefore the time of its development, the weight of the application due to the support of the libraries) worth the additional users that we can attract? It’s not for me to decide, but just for information: at the moment there are about 5.6% of active users with android 2.3.3 - 2.3.7, and this number is decreasing every month ( proof ).
Secondly, the use of third-party libraries. Do not reinvent the wheel, do not write your own implementation of ready-made functionality out of pure interest. It may happen that after such a small subtask, you simply run out of steam and don’t finish the project (and in this case, this is our main task). Google, use ready-made libraries, if any, borrow code from open-source projects (not mindless of course). Do everything to reduce development time. It is also worth doing with commercial innovative development. The faster you show your development to the public (even if it’s a semi-working prototype), the quicker you will get feedback and see if anyone is interested in your project (read: spend less money on unpromising development).
In parallel with the development, I needed someone to compose a database of motivating quotes. I tried to contact fl.ru for help. He set the task in the style of “collecting 500 quotes for each topic, the source is not important, discard completely jammed phrases”. I reasoned that 500 quotes on each topic would be more than enough to start (what to do next is the tenth question), if it’s possible to find 500 DIFFERENT motivating quotes on the net. The price tags that were put up by the locals simply pleased - from 1,000 rubles to 20,000 rubles. Moreover, half of the respondents immediately merged somewhere and did not answer any questions.
Soundly judging that for a simple job — turning over public pages on VKontakte and reading quotes (most of the country's population does this for free), you can take some schoolchildren / first-year student for a much lower price, I decided to refuse gentlemen freelancers. Since then, I have no regrets about it. I received the quotes, paid a symbolic amount, and I and the student are happy as elephants.
Nevertheless, I kept a couple of contacts with the most interesting offers in case I would seriously develop the project and people with sufficient qualifications would be needed.
Monetization is simple. It is doubtful that someone would dare to give their hard-earned money for something resembling a banal quote book. Therefore, there is only one way out - advertising. The only acceptable for my application (try to cash in on ads in an application that is almost always closed) and the least annoying way to introduce ads is viewing bonuses. The user is sorely lacking something in the application, and in order to get it, you need to either wait a few hours or watch a commercial and get what you want instantly. Typically, the user prefers the second method. And since he himself decided that he was ready to watch an advertisement for the bonus, it didn’t annoy him so much.
It is not difficult to guess that in my case, the user should receive impressions of quotes for viewing ads. I watched the video - you can see 8 motivating quotes. I didn’t watch the video - you can see only one quote per day.
In terms of an ad provider, I first looked at Appodeal . The system is interesting (somewhere in the neighborhood on the hub there was an article about ways to increase profits), and the prospect of increasing profits by itself cannot but rejoice. Unfortunately, as it turned out during the start of development, the ability to display video ads has not yet been added to Appodeal. This feature was later added, but it is rumored that there are problems with paying for small traffic on this platform. Therefore, until better times, AdColony was integrated into the application .
I did the testing myself, and toward the end of the development, a handful of selected friends joined me.
First of all, I was interested in how people would start using my application, whether they would have questions or complications. The main thing here is to remember the purpose for which you give the application for testing. If at least 3 out of 5 respondents make the same mistake when using the application, then this is a mistake of the developer, not the user. This stage was completed without problems.
But when testing the functionality, it turned out that I didn’t understand very well some of the features of the platform, which is why the application turned into a guessing game: quotes either came or went. In this state, the project could not be left, so we had to eliminate the gaps and correct errors as soon as possible.
The torment of development is over, the application has already been uploaded to Google Play for several days. I have not yet been engaged in promotion, so I can not boast of financial success and a bunch of downloads. However, in addition to the financial component, there is another profit from the project that I have already received.
First of all, no matter how trite it may sound, this is experience. I do not mean the experience of solving technical problems (although it certainly was), but the experience of independent development. For a couple of months I had to go to several simplified roles of PM'a, designer, employer and content manager. After some time, I will have the first experience in promoting the product. Even if you are not going to leave the employer and start your own business, this experience will help to better understand all the processes that occur during the development of the project. At least you will be more tolerant of changing requirements and introducing a new design.
Secondly, you get one more application in your portfolio (and if it is the first in your portfolio, then there’s nothing to talk about). Yes, it may not be very difficult and unsuccessful in terms of attracting users and money, but it is completely yours. The idea, design, code - the project from start to finish is implemented by you. If you did this, then you, at least slightly, are technically savvy. If you have a good design and the application is convenient to use, then you can not only pass on the mock-ups of the designer, but also consult on how best to add this or that detail (I still remember the unsuccessful warriors in the style of "- It won’t work, either it doesn’t fit, or it will be too shallow! -Just do it, but we'll see. "). And finally, if you have implemented a project without motivation in the form of money, then what can you create for money?
And of course, you will enjoy realizing that you have done something completely on your own. Yes, many have projects carried out in a team, or without a team, but with a customer and financing. But the implementation of your own project, going through all stages of development, the realization that “I wanted, invented and implemented”, gives a completely different feeling than hired work.
I have everything, thanks for reading this long post. I hope at least someone found it useful. If anyone would be interested, I will supplement it later with experiments promoting their results.