Voice4u Behind the Stage (5) – The Development

This time, we will be revealing to you the story behind the development of the heart of our product.

Once we gathered lots of information, pictures, and sounds, we moved onto the technological development of the product.

First, we brainstormed our ideas–What kind of product do we want to create? What kind of functions did we want it to have?

The team in charge of product development said, “There is nothing that you can’t do on an iPhone/iPod Touch App, so please, share all of your ideas with us”.
Because I have struggled so much with communication devices for more than ten years, I shared with them loads upon loads of ideas and suggestions, being sure to include the ideas of specialists and mothers as well. The people on the product development team took each and every one of these ideas into consideration, doing there best to incorporate as many desired features as possible.

We paid attention to especially the user interface.

We carefully planned so that…

1. The child can stay concentrated even when the application is booting up

First of all, the activation of the application. For the $190 device that I had previously purchased, the screen remained white while the program started up. Many hyperactive autistic children are annoyed by this white screen because they don’t understand what it does or what it means, and above all, they don’t like to wait. If there is nothing on the screen, children are likely to lose interest and run off to do something else. Unlike other products, Voice4u has an entertaining loading screen with cute icons, making a child curious about what will appear on the screen next. By having such a loading screen, children will be less prone to running off to do something else; even hyperactive children.

2. The program flows/operates smoothly

For other products, once the program has started up, the application operates somewhat awkwardly like an old and outdated robot. Fortunately, Voice4u will not do this. You can scroll through the icons smoothly and choose the one you wish to use. We can offer this feature thanks to the individuals who spent so much time developing a code enabling the icons to scroll smoothly. We can assure you that we have spent more than twice the amount of time and labor developing this product compared to competing companies.

3. The application doesn’t freeze or crash

Other applications will crash just by tapping to far on the edge of the screen, or the audio will become like an echo if you tap on an icon consecutively. This can be a problem to any parent, trying to boot up the icon again to no avail, and while doing so losing the attention of their child. We have made sure that Voice4u does not crash as frequently, if at all, to save parents from this inconvenience. You can use this product for long periods of time without having to worry.

4. Icons can easily be added

If you tap on the “add” button at the bottom of the screen of any icon, anybody can easily create a new icon.

5. Excessive features do not make it confusing

We did not add lots of confusing features to Voice4u, which is the first creation in our line of products. Even though it may be useful if certain features where included, adding them would only make the management of the product overly complicated. If this happens all users and specialists will be pained. It is important to first become comfortable with using the product to communicate with others. We focused on this idea when developing this application.

As you can probably see, the heart of the product was developed with great care. Hopefully this product will be able to assist you for a long time.

Next time, we will be talking about the price of the application.