RealTalk

I joined Alexandre Roche at Successful Business Co in 2016. He had founded RealTalk, and Daniel Smith and Keegan Jones were already working on it when I joined.

RealTalk started in 2015 as video messaging between friends. By early 2016, it had become a way to make new friends through short, pixelated videos.

My work on the iOS app covered its interactions, inbox, and video-message delivery. I later worked on joining and leaving groups and revised parts of onboarding.

Everyone had a conversation starter. It could be a question about your favorite place to visit or what you were reading that summer. To answer, you held down a button and recorded a short video.

Pixelating the video was a way to take some of the pressure off being on camera. You could still hear someone's voice and see their expressions. You chose an alias and an interface color, and picked an emoji to go with your question.

I built a new emoji picker with pages and category controls. I also animated the send transition so the conversation moved upward as the next view scaled and faded into place.

I added the "New Humans" discovery view, which loaded people to talk to and brought up another conversation after you sent a message, skipped someone, or closed a conversation. I expanded the existing navigation to move between discovery, friends, and the inbox.

Your question sat at the top of the inbox, with new messages and friends below it. I rebuilt the inbox to bring messages and friends into one view, with shared code for loading, refreshing, empty sections, and errors.

Messages expired after 24 hours so your inbox wouldn't fill with conversations you felt obliged to answer. Once you became friends, messages no longer expired, and you could send another without waiting for a reply.

I reworked the delivery code to track multiple queued messages to the same person. I also changed how playback waited for downloads and how the app reused cached videos and cleared files it no longer needed.

The more you talked with someone, the higher your friendship percentage climbed. At 100%, you became friends. A star-shaped portrait marked your progress, and a rainbow and a yellow star celebrated the new friendship.

I animated the friendship percentage and built the celebration with its rainbow and 3D star. I also connected these moments to the inbox and chat, tracking which dialogs someone had already seen, and built the flow for sharing a new friendship as a video, GIF, or image.

Here we're celebrating the end of Sasha's internship at Bobo's, a clown-themed steakhouse in San Francisco's Marina District.