tl;dr

In the interest of building momentum around Nouns as a cultural phenomenon and helping to reach a wider audience, we propose building a fun and quirky iOS app and companion Apple Watch app. These applications will create a playful Noun o’clock experience, allow Noun enthusiasts to explore all of the created Nouns, as well as play around with creating their own off-chain Nouns in fun and creative ways (among other features, examples below).

Apple Watch Application:

• Nouns watch face
• Fun and goofy way to keep track of time (working within the constraints of Apple watch and WatchOS 8)
• Background photo
• Custom Watch complication for Noun o’clock
• Notification about Noun o’clock
• Watch app can display:
• Noun avatar as watch face
• Noun o’clock countdown
• Generate your own (off chain Noun)
• Share Nouns (iMessage, or share sheet)

iOS App

• Notifications about Noun o’clock
• Make your own Noun (offchain) - similar to https://nouns.wtf/playground/
• Use it as your watch face
• Save it and use it as an avatar
• Share it with others (way to enable virality/spread of Nouns)
• There’s an opportunity to make this very playful and tactile by letting users shake their phone to generate a random Noun or swipe to edit characteristics

• Nouns explorer
• Browse a record/catalogue of all of the onchain Nouns that have been minted and sold thus far, with additional meta-data
• Browse a saved record of personal “saved” off-chain Nouns created by the user (using the app)
• Reference: https://nounx.herokuapp.com/

• Future extensions
• Nouns iOS widget for your homescreen
• iMessage sticker pack

Technical Considerations

• App will be built in Swift and backend in Node + Typescript
• Open question: are there any existing internal Nouns APIs we can leverage for some of the data similar to the Nouns explorer project
• Target operating systems will be iOS 15 and WatchOS 8 which is set to release later this month
• All code will be open sourced. Our goal is to encourage others in the community to extend the apps and leverage the assets for the Android Nouns app.

Design Considerations The overall design aesthetic for this product is meant to be consistent with the overall visual design of the nouns.wtf website, the Nouns themselves, and just generally be contemporary, modern, and fun.

• Share figma file and screen shots, enable comments from the community
• Describe interactions and other functional aspect of the design like flows in the figma file as well for inspection and commentary
• In the spirit of open source, we will involve the Nouns community to participate and influence the app development in a number of key ways:
• Open sourcing the code via github for inspection by the community
• Providing updates on the design and development regularly via discord
• Allowing actual Nounders and members of Nouns DAO to participate in feedback sessions and select user/usability testing sessions to improve build quality.
• Open up a public beta of the app for the Nouns community (Noun holders and non-holders) to participate in via test flight.

Timeline Concept, design and development is scoped to 4 months. See schedule below:

Co-creation We love to build in public and plan to work in close collaboration with the Nouns community, through co-creation workshops and consistent feedback loops via Discord. We will be running a beta test of both the iOS and Watch applications to identify bugs early and other deficiencies, in the aim of increasing build quality and level of polish before launch.

Team Collective DAO is a liquid super team made up of friends building playful, useful, and beautiful products with the crypto communities they love.

We’re really excited to focus our creative energy on Nouns (our fav NFT project ).

Inspired by Nouns DAO origin story, we assembled a dream team of experts to bring the Nouns app vision to life. Our goal is to make this the best and most enjoyable NFT and Apple Watch app.

Introducing the Nouns x Collective team:

Rainman, the project lead, is an experienced founder and product leader. He has over 10 years of experience building world class consumer apps. He’s the founder of X, an award-winning app studio that was acquired in 2016. At X, he launched several highly regarded apps including X for iOS and Apple Watch (featured in an Apple commercial, #1 Health app), X (#1 Utilities app), X (#1 Education app) and X (#1 Utilities app, #2 top overall). These apps have been downloaded by millions of people and have appeared in the New York Times and Wired Magazine.

Krish is a technical lead with over 15 years of experience building software products for humans. His passion for product development is based on the belief that technology can be a driving force of positive change in the world. Career highlights include professional work in games, social media, ecommerce, and fintech, with companies like Shopify, Zynga, Bitmoji, Kobo, and Questrade.

Ziad has a master's degree in Computer Science, and is a Senior/Lead iOS Software Engineer with nearly 12 years of experience in end-to-end software development life cycle from architecture design, development, testing, and support. Ziad has built the most popular water tracker on iOS, Water Minder. He’s worked on complex problems like integrating features of the eBike system at Robert Bosch to turn the bike into a cutting edge smart bike. He developed solutions to fix the unreliability of Bluetooth RSSI level using LEDs to act as Li-Fi. He extended Google’s PDFium library to support a custom render driver device using C++ for importing PDF files into the vector graphics editor.

Mohamed, is a junior iOS engineer and designer based in Toronto. He started building and designing websites as a freelancer in middle school which helped him build an appreciation for fluid user experiences. Inspired by Apple, he moved on to building out iOS apps and was lucky enough to be a WWDC scholarship winner in 2018 and 2019. Since then he’s worked at a health tech startup called mettleAI as a full stack engineer, primarily focusing on iOS, building out the first versions of the app and backend. More recently, he’s interned at Shopify for 8 months followed by an internship at Apple - both for iOS dominant roles. On the side, He’s working on a better version of GoodReads, a weight lifting / fitness social app, and has been experimenting with AR as well.

Shawn is a multidisciplinary designer with more than 14 years experience in user experience, research, and interface design. He’s built products for the NFL, Twitter, Humana, Deloitte; ran product at an AI startup; and worked on smaller e-commerce, fintech and crypto products. Shawn also has a background in computer animation, graphic design, and strategic foresight.

Matt is a multidisciplinary researcher and designer with over a decade of experience in the field of product design. He specializes in human centered design, systems thinking, and various approaches to using design thinking and other frameworks/methods to solve complex problems for his clients. With a background in Industrial Design, Matt has built extensive expertise in digital design and customer research, using these skills to build digital products for clients like Google, Facebook, Autodesk, as well as a number of smaller crypto, fintech, and proptech startups.

Compensation

We ask that the Nouns DAO fund the design & development of this project. We also ask that they fund the maintenance and updating of these applications for a period of 1 year. All code and designs will be open sourced and published to Github.

• 90 ETH for design, dev and deployment of the Nouns iOS & Apple Watch app
• 10 ETH for 1 year of maintenance and up to 4 app updates including bug fixes and feature enhancement as well as an update for iOS 16 and WatchOS 9.
• Payment to be made to the Collective DAO multi-sig

Early Concepts