communi-tea microblog app

Inspiration

The theme for this app development challenge was to create a microblogging app with focus on design. The app that Ive created largely borrows ideas from Reddit -- a social news aggregator in technical terms and informally, home to thousands of communities and endless conversation. But the UI of Reddit itself in my personal opinion was very challenging to navigate through , if it wasn't for the peer pressure I probably wouldn't have opened Reddit the second time considering how overwhelming it can get for a first time user. I admire Reddit for its concept - to connect people based on a common interest , Instagram for it's simple UI and enabling you to connect with people you know and Twitter for its emphasis on microblogging. So my aim was too integrate these core aspects from these sites.

What it does

On a platform like Reddit where strangers become friends , there is not much scope for personalisation amongst your own group of friends or people you know like in Instagram where you can share photos with your followers or on Twitter where you can follow actual celebrities so I've tried to introduce more personalisation in this context in my app by giving more emphasis to the "followers". In a nutshell , communi-tea helps users across the app connect with a common interest in mind which could be something absolutely justifiable like a cute puppy pictures community connecting millions over their adorable pictures or a whole community discussing the exact same bizarre fan theory you had about your favorite show. Your feed is curated based on the communities you follow and the most popular posts across these communities; Your feed can also consist of posts that a certain follower has chosen to share with you. In addition to these large communities turning strangers into virtual friends you can also choose to create private communities for example I know that a certain group of my followers is dedicated to Indie Music, I can then create a private community for us with an option for all of us to send Indie music posts from our favorite communities and discuss playlists. Also I took inspiration from Snapchat in order to come with a live gameroom option where the game invite self destructs after the game ends : This way people who are online can participate in live games with anyone across the world.

How I built it

I used Figma to build the UI prototype for my app.

Challenges I ran into

Although the UI of my app is fairly different from that of Reddit I faced difficulty in creating functional differences between communi-tea and Reddit

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

What I learned

"The function of design is letting design function." - Micha Commeren I learnt how subtle things that we don't even tend to look at in daily life can make a significant change in our ease towards understanding a product like whether the home button is placed to the left or to the right or the difference it would make if comments and other options on posts were color coded and how all these small details work together to create an impression on the user to encourage(or discourage) him/her to use a product.

"Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." - Steve Jobs As a "computer science engineer" sometimes you can get so worked up on the code ,functionalities and getting the product to perform that you tend to forget about the user being able to understand the product in the first place. I've always loved design but never saw how it could actually fit into the complex world of code and tech but with this hackathon I realised design is so much more than just "how it looks" , it's how the user perceives a product and experiences it.

What's next for communi-tea microblog app

Filtering content -- Reddit allows a lot of freedom on its app and is hence widely popular but also misused so a feature to disallow inappropriate content from being posted where a communi-tea bot can recognise such content before it is posted instead of waiting for someone to report it once it is posted. To allow streaming and watch parties on the app - A watchparty is basically wherein one user streams something and multiple users can view it; this could be anything from a movie to a makeup tutorial

Built With

• figma