Case Study

-isms

Our formative project: concept, planning, design, and development for a social media app.

Project Overview

-isms was the first project that Shane and Kara created together. They had the idea for it during a road trip to a music festival all the way back in 2011. They worked together to fully scope the project and solve what was then a problem: the desire to compartmentalize sharing of content on social platforms. At the time, Snapchat didn’t exist and Facebook didn’t accommodate targeted shares. iMessages didn’t have group messaging, either. They wanted to be able to share quotes and overheard lines with either everyone or just a few people, depending on the individual situation.

Inspiration

First Iteration

Public Launch

Improvement

Our Challenges

Targeted Social Sharing

We worked with small focus groups to come up with a unique way to share experiences.

Agile Design and Dev

We created the designs and built the iOS app in Objective C. The goal was to keep everything light, open, and simple. As we neared launch, iOS 7 was released, and we incorporated some of the features that Apple’s new interface allowed.

Selective Public Posts

We allowed users to adjust the privacy levels of each post: they could post on Facebook or Instagram, post to the main -isms Feed, or just post to the feeds of certain friends within the app.

Iterative Feature Building

We went through different iterations, and incorporated short videos that played in the background of the feed, added photos, and presented the visual components in a way that didn’t detract from the text of the quotes.

The Outcome

The First Experience

-isms launched in early 2014, just as Snapchat started to gain traction. The timing wasn’t great, but the experience of conceptualizing, designing, developing, and pitching an app was extremely valuable, and a great launching pad for ClearSummit.

Belkin: Phyn

JetSpace

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