Product Story: 4 months of intensive work in a nutshell
Hi from 1MillionNFTs!
So, we’re just about to release, and it’s time for a short summary of what we’ve been through in the meantime. This is sort of a product roadmap, a project retrospective from April through August.
April–May 2021. UI/UX Design
After working on the concept, we began to design. Our task was to make the interface as simple and easy to use as possible. All in all, despite the simple structure, we reworked the prototype several times, trying to make it even simpler and more understandable.
The layout is based on a clean crypto design, and the structure is divided into several main blocks: the main page with the grid, the editor, and the marketplace. The number of small service pages is minimal: a brief description of the project and F.A.Q.
There are two themes: light and dark to make the interaction more comfortable for users.
April–June 2021. Blockchain development
April, May, and June were the hottest months. It was important for us to develop without any backend. So the main bulk of the solutions are pure blockchain. Let’s face it: it turned out to be quite a challenge. Just imagine, there are 1,000,000 NFTs on the board, it is a large amount of data, so its processing and display required non-standard solutions and approaches.
As a result, we were stuck with the need to find a compromise between user comfort and preserving the security of the blockchain itself. In order not to break the principles of blockchain, the main features of the product were constantly refined and improved. Each time we faced a limitation of the amount of gas per block, and we constantly circumvented this limitation in every possible way, despite the complex algorithms and tasks at hand.
We will talk about it in more detail later, but in short, the most gas-consuming processes are cycles, and some of our operations, by their nature, can only have a cyclic behavior. Oops)
The second huge challenge was preserving international NFT standards. It was important for us not to come up with our own NFT, but to work with those standards that provide ultimate value to users.
Just imagine: when our user allocates a minimum zone (10 by 10 pixels), it turns out to be 100 pixels. That is, the smart contract is called 100 times, and there is no way around it. In essence, it’s like creating 100 pictures and trying to fit them into a single block of crypto. Therefore, the area is divided into parts and multiple transactions. This is to keep all the requirements of NFT and provide users with a really valuable product.
June–July 2021. Frontend
We had spent June and July on fire: we combined the improvement of blockchain tasks with the frontend, namely with the implementation of fields, zooms, and other interface elements.
Here we wanted to provide users with maximum speed and comfort in the process of interaction: so that everything worked correctly, scrolled comfortably, and so on.
July–August 2021. Product optimization
The front end gave us a few more challenges and discoveries. Thus, we were faced with the need to work out the number of requests and optimize the cache. July and early August were spent optimizing the product.
For example, field loading proved to be a problem area. Initially, it was made in 1000 smart contract requests, and now we’ve reached a figure of 25 requests. That is, we reduced this figure by a factor of 40 (!). The number of requests affected users, and it was important to us to reduce the number of iterations a user has with the platform.
August 2021. Testing
Now we are in the testing phase, and a small focus group is constantly checking all the weaknesses of the product, trying to bring it to the most comfortable form. Also in the testing process, we identify questions and difficulties faced by the audience, and we are now forming a F.A.Q. section based on this.
Product Launch
We are planning a launch very soon, and now almost everything is ready for it. The team is immersed in work and spends literally 24/7 with the product.
Stay tuned!