CompassAZ App
I joined the communications team at Compass Christian Church in September 2019 as a project manager. I was spending my days in ClickUp Productivity Platform everyday handling projects requested by the ministry staff. Thanks Typeform for helping me solve the confusion surrounding the Wordpress form that was in place prior.
Another piece of software in place that wasn’t fitting into a modern place of work and church was the Compass app created with an app platform provider. It appeared to have been tossed together with little consideration of the people who would be using it when they are on or off campus. The scrolling wasn’t intuitive and all the content lived elsewhere. I suggested to my manager that we revamp our app and I’d be willing to take the project on myself.
I learned about the Subsplash app platform in 2014 while I was a sophomore in college listening to The Village Church sermons during my drive to class. I looked into their platform and was impressed with what they offered today. I met with an executive sales rep who was in town over dinner and got connected with one of their account managers. She was very helpful in getting our app launched. I was excited to build this thing from the ground up, get our Apple DUNS and Google Developer numbers off the old platform and onto Subsplash.
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I wanted to get the app live quick, but not put out something I wouldn’t want our congregation to download. I was learning the world of UX and Product Design in my spare time as a PM. I did some quick research and took these steps on designing and launching CompassAZ
- Get inspiration from other leading church apps
- Consider the end user’s most frequent actions
- Design a few different ways to display information
- Launch demo on TestFlight and get feedback from team and adjust
- Repeat the step above over and over
- Publish to Apple App Store, Google Play Store and have the entire staff download and ask for feedback
- Continue to improve on the live app to a more finished product
I knew my first release wouldn’t be perfect. I gave up perfection towards the end of my time as a cinematographer and now prefer continuous improvement. The release from 12 months ago is a night and day difference from today.
