Iflexion stepped up as a technology partner experienced in mobile and web portal development, capable to work in an Agile startup environment. From the very beginning it was a very close collaboration ¾ the founders of the customer even worked at Iflexion’s development center shoulder to shoulder with a development team for a week. They even took the responsibility for timing, tasks distribution, and allocation, as well as the engineers’ workload.
Fixing old code
In the beginning of customer portal development, Iflexion analyzed the code, performed a vulnerability scan, and made estimates about the scope and volume of the code that needed to be rewritten. The startup team was not ready to rewrite the code completely re-starting their customer web portal development from scratch. Instead, they opted for correcting business-critical errors that affected security and performance. Iflexion took care of eliminating render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content, leveraging browser caching; prioritizing visible content; optimizing images; minifying CSS and HTML, etc. Together that helped cut down page loading time to less than 1s even under slow connection.
Developing “On-the-job” quotes
Initially, the service calculated the price upfront for regular jobs only. However, the quotes for tailor-made orders were absent, and that was a key point early adopters stressed in their feedback.
Iflexion delivered “On-the-job” quotes functionality for both web and mobile versions of the service to enable additional options and organize the approval process of these options between the gardener and the garden owner, improving the user experience.
The steps of the “On-the-job” quote approval process are: after a job assessment, the gardener edits the job, offering options such as additional hours, waste removal, parking, plants, soil or turf, etc. The garden owner receives a notification for a quote (in the app and by email), assesses the quote and either approves or rejects it. The gardener receives a notification about the owner’s decision.
Adding third-party functionality
Following the Agile customer portal development practices, Iflexion's team enhanced the service with the third-party functionality and delivered the following integrations:
- Tawk to enable an online chat between users and administrators
- Google Maps API to allow for address lookup and parsing based on postcode
- MailChimp to automate emails (on status updates and new job reminders), alerts and notifications (on booked, accepted, and completed jobs); we also customized MailChimp to provide the customer with the extended functionality and offer full control without further development efforts
- Twilio to anonymize calls between users for better security and customer loyalty
- Xero for PCI-compliant automation of billing, accounting, and reporting (done manually before Iflexion’s involvement)
- Stripe to guarantee online payment safety
Enhancing UX
Aimed at making the website and mobile app more intuitive and user-friendly, Iflexion helped the customer with the following UX enhancements:
- Restructuring and enhancing page elements
- Visualizing newsletter subscription and booking status features
- Improving the look and feel of the home page
- Freezing call-to-action page elements during scrolling.
