Background

LubDub was conceived as a mobile app to help users make decisions and get quick opinions from friends, family, and the world. If you need to decide on dinner plans, pick a movie to see with friends, capture decisions in meetings, or find out how people feel about important issues, LubDub can quickly and easily help while avoiding the problems of texting and emailing disparate groups and collating responses from your audience. With LubDub, you can create a quick poll using a template and post it for response to your followers in less than a minute. Polling can start with a narrow audience of your choosing and then later enlarged to include more followers or everyone. Results and voting are reported in real-time, allowing you and your followers to actively participate in the decision and opinion making that's happening, conveying a sense of connectedness and inclusion in this social activity.

Project Work

LubDub was a startup idea we built from the ground up. Our work on this project included product concept, user interface design, system architecture, and development of the iOS mobile app and the backend cloud services.

Unique to this project was the goal to have voting and results shared instantly with users in real-time, without the need for pull-to-refresh or requiring the user to initiate some action. We researched and built prototypes with several technologies that offered services for subscribing and pushing data to clients. Ultimately, we chose Google’s Firebase Realtime Database. It offered impressive performance, low latency, low cost, and a state-of-the-art architecture that was easy to use as both a backend database and a real-time publish and subscribe notification system.

Offline use of the app was also a goal for LubDub. We achieved this using a combination of a local Firebase database on the iOS device and custom software and systems we developed that support poll creation, voting, and profile updating all while offline. A sync system was designed and built that handled updating the server and client apps when network connectivity was restored. All of this was handled in the background seamlessly and invisible to the user.