Think It…The Challenge: When visiting Paris, our client discovered a thoroughly modern conundrum – carrying an outdated travel guidebook was both cumbersome and painfully obvious one was a “tourist.” Like most seasoned travelers and true Francophiles, our client wanted to venture beyond the typical tourist vacation and explore the city like a local.
The Solution: Our team of idea nerds collaborated with our client on the Big Idea of a mobile app that was incognito, as easy to use and understand as an up-to-date guidebook, and could be updated by local Parisian tour guides with off the beaten path adventures in real-time. Voila! The Paris Underbelly app was born.
Build It…
In building the Paris Underbelly app, our nerds identified three key qualities most important to our client:
- Speed to market – getting the product available to end users quickly
- Affordability/compatibility – keeping the budget low while making the app available on multiple mobile platforms
- Exceptional aesthetics/quality – making the interface both “sexy” (graphically appealing) and easy to use
Getting to work, our nerds identified a mobile web app as the best solution to meet these requirements. Now for the nerdy bits… The front end was developed with HTML, CSS, and Jquery Mobile. While the back-end consisted of a design that would allow for multi-node MongoDB clustering with automatic failover with two AWS instances running node.js setup in a master/slave configuration for high availability. Additionally, PhoneGap was used to package the web app for deployment as an iPhone/iPad app. The result? Our nerds met our client’s financial, time, and functional requirements with a fantastic product.
Share It…
Working with our client, our nerds assisted with placement of the app on the Apple app store. Additionally, our nerds advised the client to have the app reviewed by various high-traffic travel sites, such as Trip Advisor.