God save the simplicity

So let’s say you want to give users the ability to customize their own avatars in your app. And let’s say that you definitely think that this simple, little thing should be really easy peasy lemon squeezy, right?

Well… WRONG!

Sometimes what’s easiest at first glance costs enormous amounts of effort and resources.

And we’d like to share how these simple little now CUSTOMIZED f@ckers ate almost 8 months of our lifetime, but the results were totally worth it.

The beginning

The insight was pretty simple: there’s no two same people in this world (except twins of course, but that’s not the point 😂) so why on earth should their Qooore avatars be the same?

Allowing users to post their own photos was never an option because:

a) traders (our core audience) are usually very shy and introverted and wouldn’t bother to do so
b) this is boring AF and we’d rather be dead than become like some average investment app

So we naturally decided to make some sort of avatar builder for them and there was no turning back for us.

The process

Of course we hadn’t even the slightest idea what the f@ck our avatars should look like. And the first step was to find a bunch of talented illustrators whose style was solid and pick one of them. With the help of the “Chosen One” we created a list of common rules for our future pics, prioritizing the simplicity and variability of each one.

When the style was found and the first pack of cartoonish faces were ready to go we released them to traders. And, to our great delight, Qooore users immediately started to use them.

The next step was to add more customizable parts to the menu. We had to draw various eyes, noses, lips, hair styles and accessories and also check that their combinations (an enormous amount of them actually) looked good together. Yes the Chosen One stuck with us as a fulltime illustrator for four bloody months. And yes this circumstance was completely out of our planned picture both conceptually and FINANCIALLY 😱

Then the shadows decided to f@ck us up. Oh god the motherf@cking shadows for every element MUST behave themselves well, otherwise you’ll get a bunch of Cronenberg’s Frankensteins instead of cool avatar pics. This was exactly what we were getting at first and only successfully dealt with this problem later.

And don’t underestimate the complexity of layering all the elements together. This part was really HUGE, but we made it. Well, almost made it. Some headpieces still don’t want to sit properly on some heads and some hair styles just won’t sit under some hats & beanies. But we’re working on it.

The final rendering of the avatars was the greatest leap of faith due to rendering complexity and format variety. Through pain and suffering we figured out the exact proportions and scaled everything altogether so the end result fitted the app perfectly.

And of course we screwed up this part. (By that time we started to get used to screwing things up on this project actually.)

The end result

Actually the end result itself isn’t here yet and the whole process is one giant journey that lies ahead of us but we can already answer one simple question: was it worth it?

Hell yeah!

Minus screwing up almost every part of a planned road map, all our efforts (which are completely invisible to users by the way) allowed us to create our own unique and complex tool. And now this tool successfully helps our users to create their own unique and complex avatars staying stylish AF.

Well almost)