Wow! It has been a really long time since our last update. We apologize for that but rest assured, we’ve been working hard behind the scenes and below is a summary of where we are.
On our last update, we were working on a Settings and Accessibility milestone. We are happy to report that milestone is finished! Now we are on to our “Final Refinements” milestone to prep for launch.
The Final Refinements milestone is a catch-all set of tasks to prep for launch. These include things like mobile app UI refinements, Google and Apple App Store publishing, legal compliance stuff, marketing plans, and, perhaps most importantly, demoing the product to the initial designers to make sure they are ok with us publishing their patterns and with the way their patterns will be represented in the Fiber Club app.
Also since you last heard from us, we hired an accessibility consultant to test the iOS mobile app for users with visual disabilities. The consultant pointed out a few issues that we needed to address. The Fiber Club app is fully compatible with most accessibility features provided by iOS and Android. Unfortunately, when scaling up the font to the very largest settings it broke the layout of many screens. While these usability and user experience issues are never ending, we believe we have addressed them all for a minimum viable product (MVP) launch.Other things we have done since our last update:
- Updated navigation within the app and removed screens that won’t be part of the MVP.
- Added features to delete your account so users can remain in control of their data
- Updated our terms of service and privacy policy to clarify what data we will collect and why
- Fixed some bugs relating to sign ups via email/password
- Infrastructure monitoring so we get notified when things are broken
- Updated Yarn Amounts in the backend to accept decimals instead of whole units
- Added haptics support
- Updated the font used by the app and website to be more accessible for certain users
- Updated certain icons to resize based on accessibility settings
- Miscellaneous UI fixes
So, what’s next?
We will be contacting designers individually to get their approval before we publish. While we expect this process to be time-consuming, it is necessary because this initial version doesn’t have a way for designers to edit their listings. We expect that we may have to make a few tweaks here and there based on designer feedback.
We may also hire the accessibility consultant once more to take a look at the app now that all issues have been addressed just to make sure we haven’t missed anything.
And then, if all goes well, we will do a soft launch!
Originally posted on November 9, 2022.