The goal:
The long term goal of Contact is to simplify your online presence and make staying connected with friends and family easier. In todays world there are so many different social media accounts to check, it is near impossible to keep up. Contact will streamline this process, by creating a platform through which you can filter everything ensuring you never miss a thing, be it an email for work, or a message from grandma. Contact will also provide you with a simple way to share your information with friends or business associates and allow you to personalize what you share with who so incase you don’t want a potential client to see what mistakes you made over the weekend and posted on Instagram, or to ensure that person you didn’t really care for in high school but happened to run into at the grocery store doesn’t have your actual phone number.
The plan:
The way to achieve this is simple. Upon creation of your Contact account, an email address will be generated for you by Contact. After you finish setting up your Contact account, simply replace your current email address on any social media you’d like to add, and turn notifications by email on. From there, Contact will do the rest.
As for connecting with others, Contact will have a 3 tier sharing system. You can customize them however you’d like and personalize each tier. You could have one for old friends in which you share all of your information, one for new friends where you share your social media information but maybe not your personal phone number, and one for business where you may only want to share your work email and business phone number as a digital business card of sorts.
• Full social media notification integration
• Shareable via Text message, email Bluetooth, Airdrop etc.
• Tier system for sharing options
• Retractable/ additive share settings
• Fully encrypted messaging system
• Retractable messages
• Stacked notification options
• Audio and video calls
• Contact phone number and email address
• Contact email address for social media notifications
• Launch apps from Contact
• Limit friends ability to share your profile
• Extensive privacy settings
• Shadow block (Remove or falsify your account info to another user, and/or disable that persons ability to Contact you unbeknownst to them)
• Effective way to gather social media notifications.
• Effective way to protect privacy while still enabling you to connect with others on Contact.
• Automatically generate an email address through Contact which the user can then use on their social media accounts to allow Contact to gather notifications.
• Create a tier system the users can customize giving them full control over what they share and who they share it with.
Iteration: Trying to get the UI to be attractive and engaging without being overbearing was a challenge. The visual design should of course be appealing however not distracting and I found iterating, then stepping away and coming back to it helped tremendously.
Less is more: Also in trying to perfect the visual design, I found myself doing too much. Less really is better more often than not and this project really highlighted that.
Just do it: I often found myself thinking too much and not doing enough during this project. I eventually realized sometimes you just have to try something. It may not be the best choice, but it will help you eventually find the best thing to do.
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