An Eye Surgery Video Sharing Mobile Application

Saul, Valery, and Chris, a group of eye surgeons, approached me to create a native mobile application to extend their successful eye surgery video website. The current website allows eye-surgery training videos to be uploaded, organised, and discovered by the eye surgery community.

The vision was to develop a mobile application that:

• Allows eye surgeons to locate and bookmark video procedures.
• Allows an individual with non-programming knowledge to create step-by-step video procedures.
• The application must work on Android and Apple devices.

The Challenge

The project is part of a nonprofit initiative. As such, the budget was extremely tight; however, learning-focused applications are one of the areas I love to work in, and I was happy to tackle this challenge.

With the estimated development of the education applications between $25,000-$250,000, we had to think creatively to deliver this project at a fraction of even the lower estimate!

The Solution

Regardless of budget, given that freelancing is not my primary source of income, I am always trying to save time and money, passing these savings directly onto the client. Further, as always, I set a fixed, upfront price. In this case, I delivered a high-quality, modern mobile application at a fraction of the cost traditionally charged.

I achieved this in three ways:

• First, I focused on the jobs the application was trying to facilitate. For example, in this case, to support eye surgeons in locating and bookmarking procedures and to allow surgeons with non-programming knowledge to manage, upload and share these procedures. To ensure I met the budget, I only created features that helped support these jobs!
• Second, I created the application using a framework called React Native. React Native supports the creation of cross-platform applications. Not using React Native would entail developing two separate versions for Apple and Android. Using react native resulted in huge savings. 
• Finally, where possible, I used free tools and services to drastically reduce development time. For instance, I used the free tier of Contentful, a sophisticated content management system. Contentful allowed complex procedures to be added by and maintained by the team of Surgeons, with no additional development costs. For hosting videos, we used the client's existing Vimeo account, which means there are no additional bandwidth costs. 

The Outcome

The outcome is a polished mobile application that allows:

•  Non-technical individuals to upload and categorise surgical procedures.
• Surgeons can browse and favourite surgical procedures.
• Surgical procedures are displayed in small, manageable steps with embedded videos.