The Goal

Your Perfect Dose brought me on to the team to act as a bridge between the design and the development team. My title is Junior Software Developer, but as with most jobs my roles and responsibilities reach far beyond the title. Working in a startup forces you to be flexible, adaptable, and to play whatever role the team needs you to play. I get to bring all my design and development skills to the table to help create something incredible and hopefully make a change in many lives.

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The Design

As one of two UX/UI designers on the Your Perfect Dose team, I have played a key role in helping the team refine the aesthetic vision of the app. Since the foundation of the app we have worked across three large Adobe XD files to define assets, styles, and branding. We then took those styles and turned them into functioning prototypes. The biggest challenge in the design process was challenging ourselves to think like a user and make sure that all the components, buttons, and information was exactly where it should be. We did several series of user testing to reach current design and we made it a priority to design mobile first. Our desktop web app is lacking in the design, but we are confident that with time and user feedback we will streamline the desktop design to fit the user's needs.

Here is an overview of how we organized our design and some of our design inspiration:

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The App

As a junior developer on the Your Perfect Dose team, I worked directly with our Senior Developer to build this app from the ground up. We knew going into the project that we were going to attach the front end environment to a MySQL database which had already been set up. We also knew that between the two of us, I was stronger at building responsive HTML and styling with CSS while he was stronger with JavaScript and wiring up the backend. As a result, we initially decided to build the application with VueJS. We ran into some issues while trying to connect the front-end and back-end that neither of us could solve, so we decided to pivot to a SailsJS application. The Senior Developer had extensive experience in the framework, so I let him lead and learned SailsJS in order to work with the development environment. We were able to quickly able to set up a complete development pipeline and start improving our development cycle using DevOps strategies. Over time we refined the development environment as we added team members and focused on different parts of the application.

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Next Steps

I plan on continuing to work as part of the Your Perfect Dose team for the foreseeable future. I love the impact we are beginning to make in people's lives and I am extremely grateful to have been a part of this project from the beginning. I look forward to bringing this app to market and playing a vital role in its success.