Momo
A social media app that allows users to share memories with their inner circle.
A social media app that allows users to share memories with their inner circle.
Scrolling through social media, you often encounter posts from friends
and family, but you’re also swamped with content from strangers.
Momo aims to change this by creating a sharable photo album experience exclusively for your
closest family and friends, ensuring you interact only with your inner circle.
With only a small team of 4 developers and no designers, Trinity Studios knew that they
needed a revamp of Momo in order for it to stand out amoungst other social sharing
platforms.
Momo started out as a digital photo album, but it needed a redesign. Bryan Edward Armijos, the owner of Trinity Studios, wanted to create a welcoming and lively social platform with an interactive UI. He reached out to me with the task of redesigning the current UI that they had built into a better UI that also respects UX design principles.
Which begs the question:
How Might We...
Some possible challenges that I would've encountered with this project were:
Bryan specified that he'd like a complete redesign of the main features & screens of his app, however, he told me upfront that he wasn't sure what he wanted the new UI of his app to look like.
Because of our conflicting schedules, we only had 1 evening per week that we could hop on a call and talk about our progress. Bryan suggested we used Confluence and Slack to upload my design progress with comments and to schedule our meeting time and to keep him in the loop.
After our initial meeting, I proposed to him what services I could offer for his dilemma, I was going to provide him with moodboards, sketches, wireframes, and a final prototype throughout the next few months. We also came up with a rough timeline of when he wanted these screens to be done:
During our first week together, he showed me what him and the other devs came up with for the UI:
Afterwards, I sent him annotated screenshots of his UI to explain to him what could be altered, added, and removed for the UI:
The key points I noted from the original UI was:
After reviewing my notes, Bryan and the rest of the team initially decided that I should focus on only redesigning 3 main screens: the Feed, the Comments section, and the Messages Screen.
He also encouraged that I create a new feature that could be implemented within the limitations of the small dev team that will make the app stand out.
For the next 4 months, I got to sketching the screens. Because of the time crunch, we agreed to start sketching all of the screens within the first month:
With the sketches being approved by Bryan and the dev team, I got to work designing the wireframe of the prototype on Figma. Reason being that we needed to establish and agree on what the margins, content placement, and font sizing would look like:
Once approved of the designs, I further expanded on the wireframe to gauge what his thoughts were on the features so far:
While designing the app with the branded colors and features, Bryan let me know that the "Reactions" feature was not feasible for the dev team, they tried to implement it in the code but it was causing them problems and bugs. This started to slow down the development process and we only had 2 months left to push out a beta version of this app. He asked if I could reconsider another design for this feature that had the same functionality but was more feasible for the dev team to code.
Which is why, after much brainstorming, I came up with a reworked design for the Reactions feature:
After showing it to Bryan, he approved of it!
The beta launch went great! It was my first beta launch of an app and it was interesting to see how users reacted to the initial concept of Momo. I recieved a lot of feedback on the initial beta design, some users saying they enjoyed the unique features and colors, others provided helpful critiques on the overall user flow of the app.
Despite the successful beta test, we weren't able to properly launch the app due to budget constraints, but that didn't diminish our accomplishments from this project, and we all walked away with lessons and skills learned.
This was my first time working directly with a client and a dev team, it was really fun and educational! Here's what I learned from this experience:
However, if I could go back in time and change some things, here's what I'd do differently: