Picture Pilot helps people express their ideas through drawings. Our team partnered with Picture Pilot to build an MVP of the mobile app in which people can learn how to draw.
Roland Siegenthaler, Picture Pilot’s founder, believes that ideas are understood faster when we put them into drawings. To help people learn how to draw, Roland organizes one-day workshops, where attendees draw simple yet powerful drawings to illustrate what they mean.
When we draw, we process information using many senses and codes. The integration of multiple cognitive processes improves memory formation and retention. Learning through drawing also simplifies the understanding of even the most complex ideas.
Roland organizes visualization workshops where he helps people learn how to tell stories, boost creativity, and create infographics. During workshops, Roland discovered that users could benefit from having an option to learn how to draw everywhere, on the go.
To bring drawing abilities closer to users, Picture Pilot needed a user-friendly and intuitive solution that ran on a smartphone. The application would enable learners to learn how to draw simple objects.
Ideally, the mobile application would guide users through a series of drawing tasks with an increasing level of difficulty and detail.
“From our first call, nomtek showed real dedication to this project. And not only did they consult me on technical aspects of the app, they also provided very valuable business advice on how to establish the app on the market. Their holistic approach really convinced me. Another reason for working with nomtek is their true understanding and implementation of the agile methods,” says Roland Siegenthaler.
Complete drawing exercises that progress in difficulty. Picture Pilot guides your moves to teach you how to draw on your own.
Picture Pilot gives comprehensive lessons on the most common themes.
The application helps professionals better illustrate their thoughts — through drawings. Putting concepts into shapes is an understated skill that significantly aids comprehension.
At the start of the project, we had to validate:
Labs, our internal R&D department, organized a three-day proof-of-concept session. The R&D validation proved the idea was feasible technologically and delivered on the user experience.
Roland came to us with a considerable scope (i.e., a frontend and backend with user accounts). After deeper analysis, we advised Roland not to pursue the whole scope. Building an application that includes numerous features without first validating the idea with an MVP is too risky.
“The current app helps a lot to test the idea in a small market and show the case to potential enterprise customers. It’s a very important step towards the visualization platform it should become one day,” says Roland.
Testing the minimum viable product version of the application with initial users would give us the necessary insight as to their behaviors and the potential success of the idea.
We organized scoping sessions to remove all the features that weren’t key to validating the product idea. We also held a design workshop to create a UX for the application that would make it easy and intuitive to use.
We worked in a typical SCRUM setup, with a demo after every two weeks. Once a week, we also touched base with Picture Pilot to talk about the progress and voice any issues.
After one and a half months, we shipped a fully working MVP of the mobile application. Picture Pilot can be used as an extension to existing workshops and as a stand-alone drawing app.
Thanks to scope cuts, Picture Pilot was released without risking a significant investment. The app is currently tested by enterprises.
Picture Pilot runs on Android and iOS from a single code base written in Flutter.
“The latest development is just a first step in the journey. I’m really looking forward to taking the app to the next level. And as before the project, nomtek’s support and their ideas are very valuable,” Roland sums up.
