How We Redesigned WellSpeak App And Win A Design Award

I want to share the experience of our WellSpeak team on how to design a mobile application for free and win the nomination “best of apps design 2020 in Ukraine”

We have developed our app for those people, who cannot speak fluently in English. For people, who are not confident in their accent or afraid to make a mistake at the moment of speaking. We know how hard it is to start speaking English when you live in a non-English speaking country because our team lives in Ukraine and had the same problem at the start of learning English.

When you start a startup, your resources are limited, because they are determined by the skills that your team has. In our case, the team was not ready to build a digital startup, allowing people to “ Speak English: fluently, easily, confidently ”. All we could do was related to marketing and business, but not development or design. Therefore, we decided to outsource the development from India, and we were lucky to make the design in Ukraine for free. We could not even think that such a possibility exists. I will tell you how it happened and what needs to be done to get the awesome mobile app design.

How it was before?

I know, this design wasn't great! But I'm not a designer :)

How did it happen?

My friends knew that I was engaged in a startup. One day, someone tagged me under the post of the Dan-IT IT school on Facebook. The point of the post was that the school is looking for interesting projects at an early stage or an idea stage that needs design. Thus, they allowed their students to work on real projects and gain hands-on experience.

Seeing an opportunity to make the design better, I happily wrote to the author of the post and presented my product. I was told that for a week or two they would collect applications and as soon as they decided on the product, they would immediately let me know. After a while, I received a letter that our project was selected to participate in this program.

About the program

Every time the school recruits a new group of students, they try to give them a real project, on which the guys will work for about two months. The process itself looks like this:

• We arrived at the school office in Kyiv, where students were gathered

• We presented the current solution, talked about the product itself, what problems we solve, for whom it was made, what markets we plan to enter, and what features we would like to make or change. We also showed them our pitch deck.     

• We left the office and students started working on the product. They conducted user interviews, made user portraits, and so on.      

• After 2 months, we were presented with 10 different solutions, some of them can be seen at the link      

• After that, the school offered us to make a landing page for our product, which we gladly agreed to. The results can be viewed here

Result

We have chosen this option. If we asked design agencies, it would cost us about $ 1000 USD each. Yes, we were not active participants in the process, but in the end, we got a good result for a startup.

The guys who did this project got first place in their category and proved to themselves that they can do cool things.

Now we are proud to show our product and receive positive feedback from our users.

Do not afraid to look for opportunities, knock on different doors and they will open for you!