BlissApp: An early attempt to product design and development
In 2014, I entered an online competition to create an application with the theme: Happiness app challenge (Shape the future of humanity by creating apps to increase happiness, productivity and well being) So, I created an android app I called “BlissApp” which primarily enable people anonymously share their current emotional state with the BlissApp community. The app uses a smart algorithm to determine specific users of the community to broadcast the emotional state message to, based on a number of parameters which include, user rating, participatory quotient, current emotional state and a few other parameters.
I designed BlissApp with an interesting feature of animated facial and body animations that animate while capturing your current emotional state with a slider. The business model for revenue was tied to the sale of animated assets. By default “smiley” is a free animated asset, but a user can change this by purchasing a preferred animated asset from the BlissApp store. Version 1 of BlissApp had two assets in the BlissApp store which were; “minion” and “teddy bear”. BlissApp was also designed to make good use of colours to represent certain emotional state levels from Blue (blissful state) to Red (angry state).
BlissApp was a personal project, so I handled every bit of its research, design and development. At the end I created a short animated promotional video using my favourite 3D software, Blender. The voiceover was done by my talented brother who is now a professional voiceover artist – catalyst voiceover . I was proud of the app then, even now because, I believe it is a relevant solution for our society today, looking at the continuous high rise of depression and suicides. Recent startups like BetterHelp are currently solving same problem BlissApp was designed to solve, and this only makes me happier and willing to contribute more to this sector with the right opportunity having accumulated more experience in product design and development over the years.
