ReelCalm
Overview
ReelCalm is a community based iPhone app for identifying harmful emotional triggers in movies.
In early 2020, I made it a goal of mine to design and develop an iPhone app completely alone. Throughout the better part of the past decade, I had designed plenty of mobile apps, but had never learned to develop them. I dove deep into learning iOS programming using SwiftUI, how to work with API's, databases, and authentication.
ReelCalm was not the first idea I worked on building, but I believe it has the most potential to help people, and I could not be more proud to have designed and built this tool by myself from beginning to end.
Responsibilities
Product strategy User research Product design Development
Company
Freelance
Year
2021
Process
The idea
The idea came from a conversion with a friend who had mentioned having to turn off certain movies when certain types of scenes were shown. After discussing this with others and doing some research, I quickly realized how big of an issue this is for so many people. I decided that I could design an app that could help my friend and all of the others who struggle with this.
The execution
At first I simply wanted to design ReelCalm, and attempt to partner with a developer who could build it, but as it was COVID, and I had a lot of extra time on my hands, I decided to dive in and learn how to develop it myself, which was something I had always wanted to learn. After designing the basic flow of ReelCalm, I dove straight into XCode and through extensive research and trial and error, I built the entire app myself. I went from knowing next to nothing about iOS development to learning the code and syntax, learning about API's, user authentication, and creating backend databases. Designing and building ReelCalm was truly one of my proudest accomplishments.
