Let your photos speak themselves
Inspired by our observation on photos and CC.Days, we design DearMood allowing users to add stylish photo skins and expressive emoticons to translate their photos into everlasting memorable moments.
My ordinary days
Why We Created DearMood
After CC.Days was released, we spent much time viewing users' photos on the Internet to gain some insights. With the growing popularity of mobile devices, it's much easir for users to capture their everyday life moments. Each photo has its' own story to tell, most of the time users take photos to express their moods: no matter what moods they are in.
Of course photos can tell their stories by themselves; however, with geolocation, time, emoticon and texts on the photo, the stories behind photos stand out and viewers have more fun viewing these photos.
Concept Development
1. No more logins
When we developed CC.Days, we used Instagram as the sharing platform for its' popularity, we thought it's easy for new users to sign up for Instagram and that mechanism would totally be fine; however, after we handed CC.Days to our friends, we found out that they had difficulties in the sign up process, and the drop-rate reported on Google Analytics was high. This made us we realize that any login or sign-up process would be a large obstacle to novice users. So this time in DearMood, no more login is required, just snap and have fun!
2. Stylish photo skins
While we were starting out with DearMood, InstaWeather was very popular at that time. With the default photo skins and local weather info provided, users could tell their own stories with InstaWeather. It's a good idea not to make users think and spend much time editing, so we use photo skins instead of allowing users to zoom in/out stickers and edit texts anywhere on photos.
3. Full & light version
Some app developers would change app price to get more users and media exposure. As an in-app purchase app like CC.Days, we had difficulties in changing app price to promote it. With this lesson learned, we design full & light version for DearMood and try to put ads in light version to gain more profit, though ads would do harm to user experience, the profit was way much better than we expected.
GUI & Icon Design
While we were developing DearMood, iOS7 had been in beta and almost ready to release, we loved the simplicity of flat design and would like to catch up with the leading trend, so we implemented the design concept to DearMood.
As for the icon, since DearMood adds moods to photos, we want the icon to look friendly to attract users, and aliging with flat design, a simple and impressive one will match the spirit of DearMood. So finally an icon with eye representing the eyes for the details to ordinary lives and the symbolism for the camera lens was made.
Get Featured by Apple
After submitting DearMood to Apple for review, we sent emails to app review websites as usual, unfortunately this time none of these websites reviewed DearMood and we really felt very disappointed. While still try to figure out what to do, we lauched App Store on Friday morning and were surprised to see DearMood listed as New & Noteworthy App! it's a little pity that DearMood only got featured in 14 countries instead of worldwide, we still felt very excited for this.
The reason for being featured as New & Noteworthy might be that Asia users love those photo apps with photo skins and emoticons, on the other hand, we guess that flat design attract reviewers to highlight it. As realmacsoftware ever mentioned in their blog: Apple loves to feature apps showing off the latest OS and hardware releases.
Finally DearMood has been featured in New & Noteworthy, Apps Made in Taiwan, Chinese New Year Apps and Apps available in Chinese.
Major Updates for DearMood
1. Interactive photo skins
While planning on update DearMood with new photo skin set and emoticons, we are collecting lots of examples on the Internet as usual. When I was trying to design a fake Facebook Like Skins, Andy suggested that why not let users tap as many as likes as they want on photos? This was the start of interactive photo skins.
Feeling fun and excited, we did brainstorming to come up with more interesting and frequently-used interactive photo skins such as fortune teller, photo challenges inherited from InstaCC, day counter, percentage bar and so on.
2. Behavior sync
When we were designing the interative photo skins, it occured to us that behaviors of previous photo skins and new ones are somewhat inconsistent: users used to edit texts and emoticons by tapping specific icons below the viewfinder; however, in interactive photo skins, users can tap photos to edit the contents. To reduce the inconsistency and possible issues, we made all photo skins interactive, that is, users can tap on any photo skin to edit contents now.
Brief Summary
From CC.Days to DearMood, we've made huge changes and improvements; however, we are still searching for the right direction to make right prodcuts. And it's not easy to make your own living by making apps, at least we coduln't, but it's totally worth it when you have your own products and users.
