Design Hunt is a daily roundup of the best products, apps, and creative inspiration for everyone.
Design Hunt is a light and speedy iOS application to help designers quickly find design ideas for the day. It is curated, collected, and updated every day. The application helps keep designers and developers up-to-date with everything happening within them. It’s simple enough to look through several websites on a computer, and then skim over various images, however most of the time, the user is simply scrolling through work that was recently uploaded. Design Hunt alters this by connecting to various artistic platforms and showing some of the most popular and up-to-date content.
The App focuses on three significant areas: Trending, Favorites, and Discover. The Trending area comprises various popular and curated content from Design Hunt. While Discover lets you zero on specific content from services. Additionally, there’s a helpful Search section to pinpoint the exact content you’re looking for or just to get some random search results. Anyone who connects their Twitter accounts to Design Hunt will also be able to track their top discovery throughout time.
The daily design curation and Inspiration application Design Hunt is getting an update that focuses on improving overall performance and adding 3D Touch features to the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. The latest update also brings Design Hunt on the web, allowing users to continue their search on their desktop.
History of Design Hunt
Mobile App Development has always been at the core of our business model. By aggregating content from multiple sources such as Designer News, Dribbble, Pinterest, and Fast Co, Design Hunt can help you discover the most exciting design ideas and content daily.
Before publication, we meticulously collect, curate, and review all content. Designer News, Pinterest, Product Hunt, Dribble, Fast Co, Designspiration, Abduzeedo, and other significant content providers are used to select the best content. Our Graphic Designers utilize this App alongside additional services being offered regularly.
What if?
The idea was born out of “what is the possibility.” What could we do if we created a mobile-first application? For the creatives to discover high-quality inspiration and the most innovative products every day.
Why?
What’s the point of this kind of journey? There are a lot of websites that provide this kind of content. What is more important, what is the reason mobile is first? Why not make a site and let people enjoy the benefits of screen space?
The answer to your mobile’s first question is relatively easy. The reason is selfish. We wanted to create something we would appreciate using, which could be a part of our daily routine. We often find ourselves traveling to work daily, and our phone is our primary tool for finding information. This was when we began to think about our application. It needs to be a part of the current environment. It needs to be mobile in the first place.
The second aspect of our motive for being selfish is the desire to master mobile development. I’m a designer in the day and have to do many mobile tasks. What’s it like actually constructing one? We were interested in learning more about the opposite perspective.
Let’s get to the content. There are a lot of online resources to help you find inspirational and creative content. This is both good and bad simultaneously. It’s great for the sheer volume of available content but poor for finding hidden treasures. This is why we decided to provide less content and curate the best out of it, which was our primary goal.
Graphic Designer to App Developer
With years of experience delivering graphic design services for businesses in New York, Since our first day, we felt confident in our ability to design a fantastic application. This is very familiar to me and shouldn’t pose an issue. We did not want to design initially and then work on it later.
There are some issues with this strategy. Suppose we decide to create this application ourselves. In that case, we will have to adhere to the limitations of our skills and the technology available. The technology could not be an issue for this project; however, our experience was an issue.
Learning to develop isn’t simple regardless of the advice of anyone. XCode was not a familiar tool. At first, we were struggling to master it. It was challenging to communicate in a foreign language. We started to develop using Objective-C, and, as you’ve probably seen, the language is an arduous pill to swallow.
The world changed for us after Meng To published his first collection of Design + Code chapters. We were immediately aware that this would change our life for the better. His development method is highly accommodating to designers and ensures that his tutorials are simple to follow. If you’re trying to learn more about iOS development, please read the book. It is not something you will regret.
The other benefit was Apple introduced Swift. It’s an excellent modern language that has much lower syntax than Objective-C. It’s also much more understandable and safer.
UX Design Process
The design process was easy due to the fantastic new tools such as Sketch (used for all of our design work) and Marvel (used for creating interactive prototypes). We won’t detail the various products; however, it’s essential to mention that Marvel just launched an excellent software to Sketch. It allows you to export all your Artboards directly to Marvel. It can make all the difference worldwide. Speedily updating many screens and instantly updating your designs can save you time.
A rough prototype was created by Marvel to test the new version of Design Hunt:
It’s funny to think that as silly as it may be, the vast majority of all design for this App was done in code. We would develop the feature we want to see, then try to implement it within the App. If we successfully made it work, we revisit Sketch and consider what it could appear like. Instead of thinking about how it will look and perform, we stopped ourselves from getting bogged down during the process. We decided to release only the features we could make. If we faced issues with an element that was not working, it would be put in limbo until we could complete it perfectly. In this case, we had a personal target and a specific date for shipping. This helped me deliver our product in time.
Apple App Store Product Launch
I had several ideas on how to start this App. After spending a few days experimenting with various options, we decided to launch the App on the product Hunt only. We wanted to see the experience, and we had other backup alternatives if it did not work. Product Hunt was beyond our expectations. We were at our computer all day, watching our data increase, and our App reached N.1 product that day. We were unsure why or how we were getting ahead of the competition with Google, Dropbox, and Microsoft. Our product is in a specific market, and this is awe-inspiring.
The next day, we noticed more than 600 registered users on the App and more than 2k downloads from the App Store. The figures for user engagement within the App were in the high teens. In addition to getting lots of publicity from the product Hunt, we also gained actual users who genuinely love the App. It’s not something you can purchase.
What Now?
The project I’m currently working on is the future major update to the App. There are still bugs to be fixed, features to create, and people to inspire. One of the biggest goals I’ve set ourselves is to get Apple Watch support on day one of the Watch launches. We are committed to reaching the goal and would greatly appreciate your support.
The Apple Watch extension is expected to be similar to an additional App. It comes with a collection of features better suited to the device’s size.