Alpha 

Alpha came to us with an established community of more than 20K churches worldwide, and the desire to build a digital home for hosting, broadcasting, and participating in virtual courses. We started by building a web app and launching it with their network of churches. Next, we tackled the challenge of a fully mobile app experience on iOS & Android.

We’re a remote team ourselves, so we had a ton of UX thoughts when it came to building a video chat tool. Alpha brought its own unique challenges, so we worked with them to build a feature set specific to their use cases.

Alpha is headquartered in the UK, but they’re an international organization. Many churches in their network are also located in countries where internet and data are tricky and often expensive. So a lot of our initial ideating focused on managing multiple languages, accessibility, data usage and network connection.

We wanted to be sure that every step in the video chat tool felt clear for both attendees and hosts. Some of the core user flows (like entering a call, watching a live broadcast or joining a breakout room for a smaller group conversation) went through many rounds of testing and iteration until they felt effortlessly intuitive.

The mobile app is primarily for guest users, while the desktop app has a lot of functionality specifically for hosts. We devoted a lot of time to the host experience, where they can create large courses for potentially hundreds of participants, break them out into groups, share the course link, and prep other hosts & moderators with the right tools.

Building a video chat tool was fun (mid-pandemic, we had a lot of opinions!), and we took the opportunity to test drive the functionality a lot with our own crew. It was a delight working with the Alpha team, and we’re happy to see their community thriving with their new product.