In March 2015, the Prime Minister's Office of India (PMO India) started a contest for designing an Android app. It was part of the Digital India initiative and was organized in collaboration with Google.

This contest had 3 phases - ideation, wireframe design, and app implementation.

During the ideation phase, more than 9000 ideas were submitted by people across the country. Based on them, a blueprint of features was released.

From the next 2 phases, the contest required teams for further participation.

Wireframe Design

Our team got to know about the contest pretty late. Luckily it was the last 2 weeks of our summer vacation. So we had ample time to prepare and submit the wireframes.

Our wireframes were shortlisted in the top 10 entries, and we were invited to pitch our design to the judges.

This app would be used by a diverse set of people. Thus, we decided to address a few themes explicitly in our pitch - support for different languages and accessibility. We also focused heavily on user engagement as the app was planned as part of a more open and transparent governance initiative. And, lastly, we pitched the capabilities and past accomplishments of our team members.

We made the cut again and were shortlisted in the top 5 teams. (bonus: an extremely embarrasing photo of me)

App Design

In the next phase, shortlisted teams were assigned mentors from Google to make the app. A backend had to be implemented as well.

In retrospect, the most significant aspect of this contest was the learning opportunity. With a breadth of features to implement - user forums, payments, streaming audio (SoundCloud), SSO with OAuth, Network APIs - it was bound to enhance my skills.

This was the first time I was forced to think about real-world constraints and resources while building something. We had to think about slow connections, different screen sizes, limited memory on low-end devices, and many more things.

We used the Django in the backend. At the app level, we utilized a variety of libraries and Android system APIs. We interacted with Twitter, SoundCloud, and MyGov APIs to fetch content for the app.

Results

After months of work, we presented the app to the jury. Sadly, we did not win the contest.

We Lost ... But

The experience was terrific. I picked up a lot of new skills:

• pitching ideas
• scaling a codebase
• writing code for a resource-constrained system
• collaborating with people
• interacting with stakeholders
• (very) ambigious requirements
• ...
• and more.

In short, this was a great experience that I am going to remember throughout my life!