Peopler - Social Media App

Peopler was a social media app that enabled a real-time voice of the people of every country. Currently the majority opinion or voice of a country is only known from referendums or during elections. The idea was that with this app would enable each country's people to contribute to its real-time voice.

React Native for the front end and Firebase/Google Cloud for the backend. Since it was a fully fledged social media application I found the architecture challenging at first, and restarted the project once as I'd learnt new things about architecture.

• Tanstack Query for server side state on the front end
• Firestore NoSQL database due to unstructured nature of social media data
• Firebase App Check and Firestore security rules

The App Worked. The User Interface was simple enough to understand. At first it wasn't but I conducted live user testing to learn where users were getting confused. I then made changes to fix the flows. Some technical things I learnt and am proud of from this are optimistic UI updates for user actions with asynchronous events, differentiating server side state from client side state, growing a project from small to large and keeping the codebase modular and maintainable.

I overbuilt the first version of this app majorly. I've learnt now that when building a new product you want to build a minimum viable version and get it in front of users for feedback as soon as possible. Only adding a feature or optimising the way it looks or performs if users like it. Another mistake I made was trying to build a product 'for the entire world' instead of starting with a small group of people who the product might be extremely useful for. I've learnt since that you can't make a product catch fire with initial users unless it's specifically for them and they feel the pain point extremely strongly. During the process of building this app and live testing with users I began developing my intuition for building intuitive UX/UI's, something that is evident in my newer personal stylist project where the UI is extremely simple and easy to understand.

I've removed the app from the stores. As discussed earlier, the app was not made in a way where it could catch fire. The server costs were $5 - $10 per month. I decided to take the app off the stores.

I learnt lots and developed my skills a lot from this project. About building a product that might succeed, improving upon technical skill of building a software solution, the intuition for crafting an intuitive UI/UX. In the future I have another prototype in mind for this idea - one that would be simple and only for New Zealand. As for now though I'm focused on the personal stylist AI.