Jibe

Jibe is a social mobile app that enables its users to create communities, post threads on various healthcare topics, including questions, ideas, news etc. As discussions unfold, threads turn into chats, allowing members to engage in ongoing conversations.
Community accessibility is flexible, with public communities open for anyone to join and view posts, while private communities require invitation links for access. To better communicate, Jibe plans to integrate messaging functionality alongside thread chats. Upon sign-up users also join personalized AI chats within Jibe community, for a future functionality to type a concept or a question, and get relevant information.
The app features profile pages where users can access their posts and community memberships. Notifications play a crucial role, alerting community moderators to new threads, members, and chats, while keeping community members informed of replies to their threads.
We have also built an admin panel for Jibe. Admins can review and manage communities, threads, and reported content, removing anything that goes against community policies. Furthermore, in the future, we will incorporate analytics features into the admin dashboard that will provide insights into threads and communities. 

One of the main challenges encountered has been organizing the flow between communities, threads, and chats in an intuitive and user-friendly way. Additionally, we dedicated considerable effort to implement background upload functionality, allowing users to upload content while continuing to interact with the app. Furthermore, we have put lots of effort into optimizing media loading speed to minimize waiting times. Moreover, there is an 11-hour time zone difference with our client which makes our cooperation challenging. However, we have managed it perfectly so far. 

The implementation of the community-thread-chat flow in Jibe has been designed based on thorough research and understanding of the target audience’s preferences and needs.
To address the challenge of background upload, we conducted research to identify common practices in other social apps. To optimize media loading speed, we have implemented caching mechanisms. By storing and retrieving data, we significantly improved the loading time of media content.
Managing the time difference of 11 hours with our client has been a priority for effective collaboration. We make the most of the overlapping hours, as well as when needed, we are available out of working hours. 

We have built Jibe from scratch. Initially, they provided us with the design, but the rest of the updates have been made by our designer. The development team consists of a backend developer, a mobile developer and a project manager. For project management we have been following the Kanban methodology. We hold daily team meetings to discuss progress. Additionally, we maintain regular written communication with the client, providing timely updates and getting their input. We also have meetings with them, but only when necessary. In terms of project management tools, we use Google Sheets, Jira, Trello, and Slack.
The development is still in process. We are currently working on in-app notifications and the admin panel.

The MVP of Jibe was released some time ago. With that being said, we constantly develop new features and scale up the application based on insights gained from research among the target audience.