Welcome back! We concluded the first blog in this series by promising to share with you a preview of Milestone 1 of Project Sophomore.

For those of you who use and love Vampr, this first release will feel both familiar and completely fresh. Milestone 1 was built from the ground up with the ambition of delivering an experience which improves upon everything possible in the current version of Vampr whilst introducing some new features and a more intuitive user interface based on two years of feature requests and user feedback.

It’s also allowed us to do away with our legacy codebase so we could lay a solid foundation on which to build upon and ship regular updates throughout the remainder of 2020 and into the future.

Today we are going to focus on a couple of specific UI features from Milestone 1.

Discovery – Made Even Simpler

In the current version of Vampr users can change their Discovery Preferences in a number of ways. However if you’ve ever found yourself swiping through profiles, not finding what you’re looking for, you will probably have experienced the pain point of having to first click through to Settings followed by several other clicks just to update your preferences.

In Milestone 1 we have done away with this altogether and made it quicker and easier than ever to launch and modify your settings directly from Discovery mode. Simply tap the Preferences icon in the top left corner to launch a panel overlay which allows you to control your settings whilst staying in Discovery mode.

Sort Your Contacts in Messaging That Works

We won’t beat around the bush. Messaging in Vampr has sucked up until now. There are a whole number of reasons why but we won’t bore you with them as this is a blog series which is focused solely on the future of the platform.

Late last year we prioritised the development of a proprietary messaging solution which will see us rely less on third party providers to reliably deliver messages to and from the user.

Staying in touch with your contacts online is more important than ever so ensuring messaging works is one of our highest priorities.

Another feature that our most ardent users have requested for years is the ability to sort your contacts. When someone has hundreds of connections on Vampr it can become hard to quickly find a filtered list of all the drummers you are connected to, for example. Or perhaps find everyone who listens to hip-hop in your connections list.

So we’ve added filtering in messages. Now you can quickly sort through your contacts by genre or by skill. We hope that this will bring added productivity to a user’s networking flow and open up old conversations with useful connections.

Perhaps most excitingly, Milestone 1 will also ship with Vampr Pro. In the next blog post in this series we will unpack exactly what Vampr Pro has to offer in its first iteration in addition to the new expanded profile pages.

Until then ✌️