Kickstarter, the beloved crowd funding platform, gotten finally gotten around to building and launching its very own mobile app. It’s about time, even if it’s only available for iPhone and iPod Touch devices for the time being.
The mobile app design-wise isn’t a copy of the website, and the browsing experience is mobile-friendly. In fact the team calls the app a “total redesign” of Kickstarter, but it’s really a version of Kickstarter that fits perfectly in the 3.5- and 4-inch screen sizes.
A “Discover” tab, set aside for finding the latest projects by category, popularity, and other filters, presents the projects in an Instagram-like interface with a clear emphasis on diverting your eye to the cover images. If you click on these images, the project’s video begins playing. And of course each project is accompanied by a pledge goal, the number of backers, and days left in the campaign. If you’re in the mood to discover the hottest projects, or curious about the latest fashion projects, you can click on the tab where it says “Staff Picks” in the screen shot to change the filter’s parameters.
Kickstarter designed the app intuitively and did a great job of shrinking down its website into this smaller format without sacrificing the crowdfunding platform’s critical features. Funding projects is Kickstarter’s core functionality, so naturally the iOS app enables users to back projects directly from their mobile devices.
If you’ve backed projects in the past, the “Activity” tab is where you’d find the latest updates from these projects, but Kickstarter has thrown in a social feature. If you sign into Kickstarter using Facebook, the app pulls in any relevant activities from your Facebook friends and notifies you if they’ve backed projects, or have successfully launched a project of their own.
The final button for most users is the “Profile” tab, where you’ll see your basic profile info, and buttons for opening up messages or the settings page. Below that you’ll see a list of the projects that you’ve backed. What’s especially interesting about this page is that you can pull down the file of backed projects to reveal a pie graph that show the spread of categories you’ve been backing so far.
If you’re not “most users” however, and have started a project of your own, you will have an extra “Dashboard” tab, where you can track the latest updates from your current Kickstarter campaign, or even publish an update straight from your mobile device.
Kickstarter users will be pleased with the new mobile app, and its founders credit the designers Brandon Williams and Andrew Cornett for putting together a promising mobile start for the company.
Android users will be forced to sit in the dark for the time being. Kickstarter’s spokesperson told us that the company is “just focused on this (iPhone and iPod Touch) for now.”