The Journey of OneCase
In March 2020, right during the beginning of quarantine, my friend Jason and I got together on Discord to brainstorm random project ideas.
Share Your Interests and Passions
The first one we thought of was Ideagrate, a social planning app to streamline the planning process. We thought of taking parts from Venmo (you get to see what other people pay each other), Trello (kanban boards, task assignment), and other social media (chatting and interacting with other people) to piece them together to make productivity "addictive".
Here's one of our very early, messy sketches of what it would look like.
From March to May, we mostly spent what free time we had on thinking about how we would approach the app. During this time, we decided on using the name OneCase instead, because it was more catchy and easy to input.
At this point in time, I had virtually 0 web development experience. DOM? NoSQL? Hooks? All of these terms made no sense to me at the beginning, but after spending about 2 months during the summer learning HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React and Firebase, I was able to build a working prototype of OneCase all by myself by the end of summer. If you asked me to explain the code and technologies to you then, I could definitely do it (who couldn't after hours of endless debugging?).
You can take a look at our prototype https://theshowcase.app/lawlin. This is my profile, with two categories you can check out. This basically ended up being more like a portfolio site than a social planning app, so we had gone wrong somewhere down the line. We let some people try out the site and we found out that it felt like there wasn't much to do on the platform and the process of putting up your content was troublesome. We stopped working on OneCase once summer ended and planned to rehaul our entire concept in the winter.
Productive Journaling With Friends
When winter came, we brainstormed heavily on how we could make OneCase easy-to-use while creating a system that made people want to come back. At the time, we were thinking of ways to better share our thoughts with other people, so we decided on going through this process:
Creating a new journal
Shipping a new bite-sized update to a journal
Editing a journal by dragging-and-dropping shipped updates or manually editing it
Viewing a journal
Display all bite-sized updates and journals on user profile
To sum it up, you could create journals, add bite-sized updates to them, and drag-and-drop those updates to create a more complete journal. You can check out my profile here.
When we let some users try this version of the site out, they liked the idea but thought it was difficult to navigate. The process of making a journal and the concept of using bite-sized updates to produce a journal wasn't very obvious. It ended up being just as user-unfriendly as the first version of OneCase.
Time for more brainstorming!
Social Accountability
Now, we're currently working on a mobile-first platform to enable "social accountability" between people. There’s all sorts of productivity and social apps out there, but there’s no notable app that combines the two together to create an experience where the purpose is to invite your friends to hold you accountable (vice versa).
By providing such a platform, people that once had a hard time getting something started like working out or finishing their math homework, can now be coerced by their friends and peers to get it done. Taking inspiration also from apps like Forest, we want users to clock in their progress/updates so their friends can actually know if you’re off your phone or not. Our goal is to take the power of peer pressure and transform it into solely a positive experience for people.
November 2022 Update
We've launched the new rendition of OneCase as a mobile app back in January 2022. We've decided not to pursue it any further, but it's practically a "complete" MVP on its own so give it a try if you want. I'll write a post detailing our ideation, design, experimentation, and overall process for this version of OneCase - stay tuned!