CC.Days GUI
Best Photo Challenge App Ever!
Inspired by a 24-hour photo contest, CC.Days (formerly InstaCC) is designed to provide creative photo challenges and beautiful calendar layout for Instagram users. CC.Days has been featured in AppAdvice, Mashable, AddictiveTips, Currentphotographer and so on and the average rating is 4.5 from 4000+ users.
If you are a photo maniac or an Instagram fan, you've got to try CC.Days out!
Photos from 24-hour Marathon Photo Contest held by Fnac.
The Story Behind CC.Days
The concept of CC.Days was derived from a 24-hour nonstop photo contest in 2011 held by Fnac. Andy and I were not professional photograhpers at all, we even had to borrow another camera from friends to participate in this contest, so as expected, finally we didn't get any prize but felt worthy indeed.
That day when I participated in the contest was also the first day after resignation from my previous job. Standing at the crossroad of life, this 24-hour photo contest experience reminded me the importance of staying curious and passionate about life, and that's why Andy and I decided to create CC.Days. We hope that users can enjoy the same experience with CC.Days as we ever did in the photo contest - re-define the meaning of everything , consider every possibility , give the world your perspective, share and learn from it.
Competitors of CC.Days
Idea Generation & Concept Development
Before we started out with CC.Days, there were some similiar products in the market, we analyzed those apps to come up with our solution, and the reasons were as below:
1. Photo Challenges:
PhotoVine and Piictu allow users to generate photo topics so others can follow up, but user-generated topics statred to repeat very soon. WeHeartPics provides assigned daily photo topics, only one for each day, users would skip it easily if they aren't interested in the topic, so we decide to provide carefully designed photo challenges and users can take as many challenges as they want.
2. Calendar Layout:
Since photos might be taken on a daily basis, presenting photos in a beautiful and intuitive way is a must. Calendar layout seems to be a great solution. With all the cover photos listed in one photo, just a glance and all the memories come back to you instantly.
3. Sharing Platform with Instagram:
Instagram is the most popular photo shairng platform and users using Instagram are defineitly our tagret users. On the other hand, we expect that based on the popularity of Instagram, users can get to know CC.Days by word of mouth, so we decide to combine our app with Instagram.
Combined with the three reasons above, we decide to create InstaCC - a unique and interesting App with creative photo challenges and calendar layout.
Wireframes of CC.Days, made with Balsamiq
Starting with Wireframes
I love designing wireframes with Balsamiq to communicate with Andy, it's easy and quick to make wireframes with default elements. After finishing wireframes, I would conduct quick heuristic evaluation to fix usability issues first then discuss with Andy about the details of implementation.
Photo challenges List
Design Photo Challenges
I gather photo challenges from photography books and websites. The principles of designing photo challenges are simple, common and beautiful topics so that users won't spend much time preparation and would love to do it everyday to capture their life moments.
I come up with more than 500 photo challenges and classify them into different groups. We decide to put those easier photo challenges as free packages, users can give them a try then decide if they want to purchase those advanced ones.
GUI Design
GUI & Icon Design
I use Inkscape to design graphics because it's free. Honestly speaking, none of us had GUI experience before; however, aesthestic experience is a must for great prodcuts, all we have to do is learn and refine our designs iteratelly.
Using gradients and drop shadow to design the grahpic user interface of apps was the mainstream when we were developing CC.Days, so we read iOS Human Interface Guidelines and collected lots of great examples to figure out the GUI.
As for the app icon, C stands for the combinition of Calendar & Challenges, and the bulb inserted to the C indicates the inspiration from photo challenges, red, yellow, green and blue were the colors borrowed from Instagram implying that CC.Days has something to do with this great platform.
Featured by Mashable
Promoting InstaCC
Afrer submiting CC.Days to App Store, we started to think about promotion strategies. Being featured in App Store or app review website or by word of mouth might be the most common & afforable ways to promote apps. However, we won't know if Apple or users will like CC.Days before it's launched, all we can do is to send emails to app review websites requesting for reviews.
We've sent at least 100+ emails to various app reivew websites, in short, most of them charge for reviewing apps, if you don't pay, most of the time it means it's over...no one cares about your app, on your won, good luck.
Luckily CC.Days has been featured in serveral media such as AppAdvice, Mashable, AddictiveTips, Currentphotographer and so on. Sending emails might work, at least it's a chance to promote your app for free, if editors like your app, it will be a hugh benefit.
Major Changes for CC.Days
After CC.Days was lanuched, it's another start to us: gathering user feedback from email and comments on Instagram, observe their behaviors from their photos, study the results of google analytics to make adjustment, redesign UI to fix usability issues and increase the aesthetic experience...on and on and on.
After CC.Days was lanuched, it's another start to us: gathering user feedback from email and comments on Instagram, observe their behaviors from their photos, study the results of google analytics to make adjustment, redesign UI to fix usability issues and increase the aesthetic experience...on and on and on.
Most changes are made based on users; however, some changes based on marketing strategies. Below are some examples.
Calendar UI Redesign
1. Allow users to share their monthly photo calendars
We've observed that many users print screened their monthly photo calendars to share on Instagrsm when this feature was not available for the first version, so we decided to implemet this feature to help users upload their monthly photo calendars just a tap away.
2. Change daily cover photo
Changing daily cover photo is the most-requested featured from users, of course we also implement this for them. and users reward us with creative monthly photo calendars such collages of a series of numbers, noodles collections, pet collections and etc.
3. Add default covers to calendars
Later we were inspired by Facebook covers and decide to replace that plain black cover with colorful ones, supposelly users should be able to upload their own covers; however, based on our observation on Facebook, many people upload covers with inapporiate size which make incoherence layouts, so we decide to provide defult covers first, if users ask for uploading their own ones, we will consider it. Interestingly, only few people asked for this.
4. Cooperate with artists to provide covers baed on native advertising
Meanwhile, the growth of users had become slowly, besides keeping sending emails to app review websites, we looked for oppourtunities to generate media exposure, so we came up with a new solution: based on the concept of native advertising, calendar covers are designed to provide a seamless and engaging experience. We ask artists or popular instagrammers to provide their own works, we list their works as our covers and put their names and links below so that users can get to know them better.
Camera Redesign
1. Add more fun to photo challenges
New users got confused with the options on the screen when they launch the camera for the first time, so we redesign the camera to improve the usability: we add not only titles above ongoing photo challenges to make options more clear but a random photo challenge to have more fun.
2. Provide stylish photo skins
Photo challenge is normal to users in English language; however, to users in eastern countries such as Taiwan, China or Japan, users are confused about photo challenges. We were going to make a toturial for users to have a better understanding of photo challenge, but we know tutorials were boring, so we transform them into stylish photo skins which can not only help users understand the idea further but decorate users' photos in a unique way.
Brief Summary
So far we've updated CC.Days for about 10 times, and we are really pleased to see many interesting monthly photo calendars shared on Instagram at the end of each month: at least our product does help people in a certain way.
