Designing in Xcode with Roomee

Our solution was “Roomee,” a lightweight app to view and book conference rooms in 15 minute increments. It presents a list view of rooms that are open or available within the hour, allowing you to add and extend meeting times or see what’s coming up. Sure, you could use Google Calendar — but Roomee makes impromptu scheduling much easier. Instead of having to put in a ton of details, just a few taps can help you when a hallway discussion demands a room or when it turns out your conversation is running a little over time for what you had booked.

Building Roomee

We used Swift 3.0 and Xcode 8 storyboards for most interface layout and containing logic. On the backend we used Elixir, Phoenix, and GraphQL for server side application and runtimes.

Once the bulk of the backend was in place, I paired with a developer for some on-the-fly visual design. By on-the-fly, I literally mean we were designing at the same time as writing code — something not typical from the very start of a project. So, I decided to keep things simple — using the standard Xcode components — since we were building a few primary scenes with basic lists and actions, not an elaborate design system. I also stuck with one font weight and photos I shot with my iPhone. After a week of experimenting with our front end system, I learned some valuable takeaways from this strategy:

Roomee has been published to TestFlight.

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