Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium C4Studio

Ladies. Gentlemen. Lovely designers. Wonderful developers. We have been quite silent over the last few months – few being an understatement. Yet, we have not been unbusy.

We released an alpha of our animation tool in late August last year. And, to our amazement it was widely picked up by designers, developers, bloggers from around the world. At the same time as the release, we also opened up a short survey about the experience of working with C4 Studio, with the hopes of finding out more about the community and whether or our perspective on a new approach to designing for mobile resonated with the people in our field.

So, here is how things went down.

Alpha Survey Release

On August 30th, we opened up the alpha to the world. Thanks to Sketch Hunt and prototypr.io who linked and published our post, we had 225 downloads in the first 24 hours and over 1000 signups by the end of the week. After closing the availability of the alpha we connected with the community, answered questions, helped people learn how to use the tool, and kept our fingers crossed for lots of survey results to come in.

We designed our alpha to validate the following pipeline:

Tight integration with Sketch (instead of exporting, we load sketch files)
Design states (instead of free-form design in the tool itself)
Animate in C4 Studio
Export to Xcode

The survey was designed to validate that process.

The Results

The response to the alpha was outstanding. We had some incredible feedback, all very constructive and the majority very positive.

“Keep being awesome and making awesome stuff!”

We received a lot this kind of positive feedback about C4 Studio which reassures us that we are onto something useful! We can’t thank our users enough. People genuinely enjoyed using C4 Studio and it seems to prove our assumptions that C4 Studio can solve a lot of pain points in the design / development process that users are experiencing daily. To say the alpha process got us stoked is an understatement!

The spreadsheet we got from Typeform – easily digestable.

Major Digits

Here are some of the major statistics we drew from the survey…

Would you recommend C4 Studio to your colleagues?

How much time do you think C4 Studio would save you if you worked with it for a year?

96% of respondents said they would save a significant amount of time each year if they used C4 Studio – if only in eliminating the painful parts of handoff that happens between design and development.

Of that group, 21% said they would save months of time, and another 19% said they would save weeks.

Would you add C4 Studio to your toolset?

Would you integrate code from C4 Studio into your projects?

These numbers are pretty amazing, we were even impressed with the number of developers who trusted the code export tool that we created.

General Feedback

The general feedback we received was tremendous.

“I think what you’ve accomplished thus far is no small feat…I love the product so far! Can’t wait to watch it grow :)”

“Really love this app so far! Can’t wait to share it with the team!”

“Congrats guys, this is looking good for an Alpha release! Keep up the good work, this could become something really helpful.”

Code Export Feedback

There’s lots of work to do on the code export functionality in C4 Studio, but starting with 64% approval was incredibly inspiring. Here’s what people had to say about that part of the tool:

“The code is more reliable than pretty much anything we’ve come across short of meticulously doing it ourselves.”

“It was really great for styling, and saved us a bunch of time.”

“I have been using C4iOS to animate in some projects so I am confident to use generated code from C4Studio :)”

Why Would You Use C4 Studio?

The raison d’être.

“The ability to be able to connect with and support developers streamlines our entire process. It’s amazing.”

“The relationship between developers and designers has even less pain points, which improves overall productivity and workflow.”

“Having my designer create an animation, and me being able to integrate in into a demo app with ease.”

These are all things we were hoping people would see in C4 Studio, even in the rough version of the alpha!

Stickers Galore (a.k.a Thank You!)

To all those who completed the survey, we sent out packs complete with thank you cards and a whack of different kinds of stickers.

So many stickers. So many stamps. So many awesome!

It was great to take an enormous amount of packed letters down to the post office and ship these packs out to people all over the world. Here’s a map of all the cities – 74 – to which we sent our gratitude!

Alpha V2 is On Its Way

We’re now busy working on our second Alpha release (stay tuned), with an eye on a Beta release a few months later. If you or your organization are interested in Alpha or Beta testing C4 Studio, we’ll open up our signup page again very soon. In the meantime, you can also join our Slack channel.

Some new features to expect in V2:

Object Manipulation (you can now edit objects and their properties directly in C4 Studio!!!)
New way of adding artboards
Improved inspector panel
Better support of multiple timelines
A more powerful timeline with keyframes
Easing between different keyframes
Layer hierarchy explorer
Export in Swift 3

But, that’s not it… With the upcoming release we will have another post that outlines all the great new things that V2 already has.

<a href="http://ift.tt/2lIYHWK">http://ift.tt/2lIYHWK</a>

The Results. was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Results.

Cool stuff, every week

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