Collab4

About the Client

In the Summer of 2022, I joined a small agency from Berlin, hildebranding, to bring their app idea to life. As a freelancer, I led the technical implementation of an MVP in collaboration with Florian and Kathrin, who created the designs and overall vision. The app aims to get emotions, frustrations, feelings, and the general mood within teams before meetings through drawings. Instead of endless surveys, users draw and share their feelings visually using assistive technology with the help of predefined templates (e.g., expressions, faces, animals, vegetables, and more). The drawings are then collected and utilized by team leaders, CEOs, or others in leading positions.

Technical Details

I was tasked with creating the MVP and was given one week. Since I am most familiar with Next.js and it fits the purpose, I decided to go with it in combination with TypeScript and CSS Modules. The app structure is relatively simple but features a responsive design, various dialogs, and rich interactivity with the drawing library.

To save time, I chose Supabase as the back-end so that we wouldn't be locked into other companies, such as Google's Firebase, and because it had all features we needed for the prototype, such as authentication, database, image storage, and more. Also, the API is straightforward and easy to use. Since Next.js and Vercel play nicely together, the app is deployed on Vercel.

The project was finished on time and went through various iterations based on feedback from customers and test users. The roll-out is still in progress with promising data. Even though the base implementation is complete, I collaborate with Florian and Kathrin regularly to build new features, fix bugs, and improve the app to their needs.