SporkDAO’s community-driven and expressionistic BBB collection attracted thousands of Web3 enthusiasts following its launch last year, however the Bufficorns were not yet truly expressing the identity of their holders. SporkDAO wanted to enable community members to work with other holders to create their perfect Bufficorn through a first-of-its-kind user experience while ensuring security and brand identity. Building the application not only required the technical expertise to configure many different frontend and backend components, but also design innovation to create a seamless user experience. Raid Guild was ready and excited to assist the BBB herd.

As this project involved building zero to one with a number of organizational and technical stakeholders, we chose to approach the project with an agile methodology. We began with a design sprint, where we collected critical requirements and expectations from the client. Afterwards, we scoped the project to feature core milestones and deliverables while keeping flexibility for changing constraints and unexpected hurdles. We began with rapid prototyping and a high-fidelity UI/UX design while constructing the backend infrastructure. Once design was finalized, we built the frontend and connected the backend as-needed. After we shipped our MVP, we collected user feedback while defining requirements for what came next. We opted for another design sprint to ensure stakeholder alignment and executive endorsement before building the next big release, with ample room for testing before ETHDenver.

We used lo-fi design sprint deliverables as our starting point for the MVP. With weekly meetings (across 6 time zones) and async design communication, we rapidly constructed polished Figma designs utilizing custom assets from SporkDAO’s marketing team. Selecting and swapping traits was crafted for intuitive use, both with other users and also one’s own Bufficorns. To best optimize software engineering during this design phase, the backend infrastructure was created and eventually connected to SporkDAO’s AWS S3 bucket. Once the designs were approved, we shifted gears to frontend development and built the various pieces, hosting on both Heroku and Vercel. As the BBB is proud of its lore, we also collaborated with SporkDAO to add flavor text at the bottom of each page. After testing on Goerli and pushing minor bug fixes/feature requests, we pushed to mainnet and spun up an allowlist to permission access. We utilized LuckyOrange to analyze user behavior and maintained the site through usage.

After we developed the MVP, we utilized our design sprints and user feedback to define the next major build. It quickly became clear that the priorities were user experience and security. We crafted and built a home page, featuring a live swap feed and “trait marketplace” to enable swaps with potentially unknown users. We included a swap preview to better inform users on their new look and added rarity point information so users can better optimize for NFT tiers. Throughout all of this, we collaborated with NFT exchanges such as OpenSea and Rarible to refresh BBB metadata via their API and build “anti-rug” measures to eliminate bad actors. Lastly, in the community spirit of SporkDAO, we built a public API so the herd can create their own applications using this data.