Hello Lukas, what is Miss My Money & Stuff? Our app is a simple solution for all those people who are lending their stuff and have no idea who has their things when they are needed. Basically it allows you to track all your belongings in a clean and simple way.
Who is on the ALIENS Corporation team?
How is Miss My Money & Stuff different from competitors? The idea for the app came after relentless research on the App Store, looking for a pure app which allows lending stuff without any additional effort. The app is designed to be simple and easy to use. It allows user to lend their stuff in two steps. Take a picture of the item you want to lend or choose the amount of money you want to loan, than take a picture of the friend you are lending your stuff to, and that’s it. We will take care about knowing when item was lended, we even try to establish where it was lent at the time.
Tell us more about the icon and UI design. The icon was a bit of struggle. First we wanted to create something which will be associate dwith lending items and still be somehow connected to our app design. The idea evolved from a drawer than empty spaces in a tool shed to the simple 'add' or 'plus' symbol which is mostly used in our app at the moment.
As for the UI we wanted to create a space which will present the borrowers with all the borrowed stuff without additional clutter. We decided that it would be best to create an interface based on simple shapes so it would fit nicely with users of iOS 7. We chose cubes as the most universal in terms of presenting pictures.
As for mechanics, our inspiration was the Weathercube app and this is why our app has nice flat cubes for users pleasure. Ergonomics was a target from the start, this is why slide from left to right always takes you back and there is not a lot on the screen so you can keep focus on one action at a time.
What tools or communities assisted you in creating the app? Everything is made in Objective-C using Xcode. Testflight was used for beta testing with users around the world. Flurry as a source of user data. Twitter as an inspiration and ideas and Freesounds website for amazing sound inspirations.
What lessons did you learn building this app? Not to focus on layout in terms of point of view. Due to huge differences between design approach (yeah we argued for hours!) we spent hours of fighting trying to establish which skin is the best. We ended up in creating skins with highly customizable settings. Icon choice was a similar story but we ended up with the current one and I believe it is nice. Another thing is to keep track of milestones and stick to them like your life depended on it. Last but not least, is not to create an advertisement video. Usage video used as an advertisement is working much better and it is 10 times cheaper.