Refresh for Success: Improve Your Process and De-Clutter Your Galaxy Store with Drazen Stojcic from Urarity

[Samsung Newsroom]

Spring is here and it’s a good time to clean house in your digital world. From your design process to Galaxy Store presence, it’s important to revisit past work and make room for new ideas. To help you get started, we’ve found members of the Samsung Developers community to share advice on how they’ve successfully refined their processes and their Galaxy Store presence.

We begin our series with Drazen Stojcic from Urarity. A 2020 Best of Galaxy Award Winner, Urarity is known for its 2D and 3D animated watch faces designed with quality and luxury in mind. Read on to find out how Drazen stays organized and keeps things fresh.

When and why did you start designing watch faces?

I started designing watch faces four years ago. I had previous experience with user interface design, graphic design and animation, so it started as a fun side job that eventually grew into full time work!

As my designs have become more complex, involving various animated 2D and 3D elements, my approach has changed. I generally start off with a very rough idea of what I want to create with simple shapes that represent the general layout of the watch face with various dynamic elements. Then comes the hard part of turning these rough designs into the actual product. It usually takes anywhere between one to three months to get a fully functional watch face ready.

Do you have a system in place to organize your designs and the way you present them?

I try to stay “on brand” as much as possible. I use similar naming schemes for our watch face series, but I also try to provide the most important info in the title, so it’s clear what we’re offering. Something I think would help keep portfolios organized are more options in Galaxy Store to sort apps by tags, style, color or other parameters.

How often do you revisit your old designs and update them?

If a current design is good and has no functionality issues, then I don’t update much. Customers can get agitated if you make drastic changes and they liked the old design better. I’ve been burned by this on more than one occasion.

However, if a watch face is a big hit in Galaxy Store, it makes sense to refresh it from time to time with new functions or slight changes in design, nothing too drastic. Updating older watch faces can breathe new life into them. I still have some top selling watch faces that were made in 2017 and I try to keep them “alive” for as long as possible, since there is a large customer base.

How often should you be reorganizing and cleaning up your Galaxy Store presence?

I try not to keep old designs afloat too long. After a while, it becomes obvious that a watch face has used up its customer potential. Usually, I will turn it into a “free app” for a brief period before suspending it from Galaxy Store. I would recommend only “suspending” an old design instead of “terminating” it completely. This way, users who purchased the watch face will still be able to access it by going to My Apps in their Galaxy Store account.

Terminating apps is always a sensitive thing to do, so usually I do it once or twice a year.

When new platforms are released, do you check to make sure all designs are working?

I will usually check the top selling watch faces to make sure everything is working as expected. If I miss anything, customers are quick to point out any issues. The trouble is when you have a lot of watch faces in your portfolio and something needs updating across all of them. Things can get very stressful then. That is also a benefit of keeping your portfolio tidy - it can save you time.

Are there any specific files you would recommend to always keep handy?

While you won’t need these often, I would recommend backing up KeyStore files into several safe locations. Without them you’re unable to update old designs, leading to serious problems.

I’m very dedicated to keeping my watch faces and design files backed up. While it may seem like overkill, we have double physical backups and two cloud backups. I will also periodically do a fifth backup, a snapshot of work, that’s a folder of all the animation, graphics, and project files with a time stamp. This requires a lot of storage space. However, these precautions have saved the day more than once, so it's worth the investment.

What’s the one piece of advice you’d give a designer about organizing their work to keep it fresh?

Don’t be afraid to “trim the fat”. A watch face will often drop in sales after the initial launch and settle at producing small but continuous revenue. These are the ones that are hardest to cut. It’s not a problem if you have only a couple of these in your portfolio but maintaining many of them may cost more than they’re worth. Come up with a monthly revenue you expect from any watch face and once it drops under that line, it’s time to consider suspending it.

Thanks to Drazen for sharing helpful advice on improving the design process and de-cluttering your Galaxy Store. You can connect with Drazen and Urarity on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. You can also check out Urarity’s full collection of watch faces in Galaxy Store.

We hope this post helps you start your spring refresh for success. Remember, making Galaxy Store updates is key to keeping your seller account active. You need two activities every three months that trigger an app review by the seller portal team. An activity takes many forms, and can be anything from uploading a new app, to updating a current app, hanging the description or adding/updating photos. However, changing the price of an app does not count.

Stay tuned next week for the second installment in our ‘Refresh for Success’ series and follow us on Twitter at @samsung_dev for our latest updates.

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