Zoosi is a joint project that a couple of friends from college (Tou Yia Xiong and Tou Lee) approached me about. Tou Yia had illustrated these great animal flashcards to help kids learn Hmong, and between the two of them, they were looking for a way to digitize the cards into an app and came to me.

Together we worked out a plan for taking the flashcards beyond print. The apparent answer was to create a mobile app that would work across tablets and phones. So, we worked in unison on the design and interaction of the app while I started working on the plan for how to build out the actual code.

I landed on building the app itself in native Javascript with the help of a few light-weight libraries to keep every performant on all platforms. This then was bundled in Apache’s Cordova for distribution to allow the eventual deployment on both iOS and Android, and help create a fluid layout across device sizes with little effort. The process of optimizing the code to keep the animations and interactions fluid was time consuming, but having a flexible and responsive interface was worth it.