The Unscripted app is something that offers the world’s largest database of poses and prompts, an easy client management system and everything you need to feel confident as a pro photographer. 

They approached us to bolster out their offering to the 500,000+ strong & active users they boast on their platform and build a global photographer directory, with an easy way to integrate all the back tools with a front end to get them the work.

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The development was broken down into three major stages, with each stage informing the shape of each subsequent stage. 

The first stage was to build out the jobs and directory platform. This included:

- Creating a smooth onboarding experience for photographers where they could leverage their Instagram profiles to create a compelling portfolio in 5 minutes or less.

- Creating a job creation funnel for potential clients to rapidly express their photoshoot needs and expectations, and have those jobs reach the right set of photographers based on location, cost and session type.

- Creating a searchable directory of photographer profiles for potential clients looking for professional photography services, or for other photographers seeking mentors or collaborators.

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Once the first stage was successfully completed, we came to the understanding that the platform would need additional features to make it retentive before we had the critical mass of photographers that we would need to entice potential clients. The second stage involved developing additional photographer focused features including:

- A client gallery delivery service where photographers could upload photos from a shoot and send a digital album to their client.

- An inspiration board collecting categorised images from photographer profiles to give inspiration to both clients and photographers.

- A collaboration board designed to be a notice board for photographers to reach out to the community for help, opportunities and advice.

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The third and final stage was to focus our attention on facilitating the migration of existing Unscripted app users on to the new platform in a way that felt natural and pain-free. Up until this point, the database of the web platform was not connected to the existing user database in any way, and it became clear that these platforms would need to be in constant communication with each other to offer a seamless experience. The third stage involved synchronising the web platform with the mobile apps and ensuring users recognised their profile data on the new web platform. This included:

- Creating an API in Rails to communicate changes between the Firebase mobile database and the PostgreSQL database and ensure that data always stays in sync.

- Migrating all 500,000 users in to our PostgreSQL database and ensuring that they would be able to seamlessly log in to the web platform.

- Developing the most commonly requested desktop features from the Unscripted community in the new Web Platform so that photographers could begin to migrate their workflows into the new web environment. This included photoshoot management, invoicing, client management and more.

- A complete design overhaul of both the mobile app and web platform interfaces to make the visual transition between platforms smooth and congruent.

This project is ongoing and the community is building, watch this space at unscriptedphotographers.com