Building a Clean Clutter-free and Intuitive Android Application — Vakai Quotes
One of the many beautiful quotes listed in the Vakai Quotes app:
All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. — Pablo Picasso
I just released my first app — “Vakai Quotes”. Vakai Quotes — is a Android Application which has thousands of selected inspirational quotes. This blog post details my experience building this application. The app was released 24 hours ago and built in 24 hours. It has around 100 downloads by now, thanks people! #AmExcited!!!
When I shared this application in my circle, many asked this question: What does ‘Vakai’ mean? Why ‘Vakai’?
And here is the answer, Vakai (வாகை) is referred-to as the flower of victory in ancient Indian literatures. This application is intended to inspire people to achieve success/victory. I couldn’t find a better fitting name for the application than ‘Vakai’. PS: I’m also planning to name my future applications with flower names too!
I wanted to learn android development for nearly 4 years now. I still remember pestering my parents to buy me a laptop, so that I could build a mobile app. And it took 4 years to build my first application. If Procrastination was a college degree, I would have easily aced it. Last weekend, I so badly wanted to put an end to this procrastination and take a step towards learning android. So downloaded Android Studio and several ‘Introduction to Android Development’ tutorial videos to get started.
I’m an arch of believer of ‘Learning by Doing’. It has more advantages than simply reading through tonnes of material or watching dozens of video tutorials. So as I learn Android, I started to build a simple application.
Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn. Benjamin Franklin
‘What to build?’ my next BIG question. I didn’t want to spend more time in this question, as my main intention here is to learn android . Several months ago, I had scraped thousands of quotes from internet for my personal inspiration. Why not use the data to build a Quotes application. There are tens if not hundreds of Quotes application already available in the Google Play Store. I needed a way to differentiate my application from others. After looking at several Quotes apps, I observed most of them are cluttered with overloaded content and too many options, have annoying ads and bad design. So, the guidelines for me are set — Create a simple, clean, clutter-free intuitive Quotes application with just the right options and nothing more. Providing too many options can sometimes be overwhelming for the users. So I just wanted to create an application which does it primary goal right — Display Quotes. Couple of hours of surfing Pintrest for ideas, finalized on a UI design and it looks like this.
The Goals I set for UI:
- Clean and Clutter-Free
- Clear and Legible Font
- Simple and Limited options
This design seems to satisfy all of my above mentioned goals.
Functionality I intended to achieve in the application:
- Go to Next Quote.
- Share quotes to Social Media.
- Bookmark favorite quotes.
- View Favorite quotes.
When we click on the ‘Next’ button, the previous Quote is gone, and the next one appears. No going back to previous one. Like ‘Time’, once a moment is gone, it’s gone. No dwelling back in the past, its time to move on and experience something new.
The design of the ‘Favorites’ page looks like this.
This is my first attempt in building a mobile application and I hope it’s a decent one. Here is the link to the application — Vakai Quotes:
Download the application, try it out and please do give me your valuable feedback. It helps me grow!
