Month: April 2021

Background

We’ve been developing and supporting our client’s logistics app for over three years. The application was designed as a supporting service for customers, allowing them to track and manage their parcels, choose a pick-up location, get discounts from partner shops, and connect with customer support anytime and anywhere.

The Mobindustry team developed mobile apps for Android and iOS, while our client’s in-house development team handled the backend.

While a visual redesign was the initial goal, our client’s marketing department saw a great opportunity to also improve the app’s conversion rate

In the 2.5 years that these apps had been on the market, our client’s competitors had launched their own applications with more modern, flat designs. During this time, our client had also gone through a major rebranding, creating a new brand book and changing their logo and corporate colors. The new brand book influenced the visual style of our client’s website and branch locations. This led to the necessity to redesign the app according to the new brand book.

While a visual redesign was the initial goal, our client’s marketing department saw a great opportunity to also improve the app’s conversion rate by making it more user-friendly and modern.

Our goals

We planned to achieve several goals with the redesign:

• Catch up with current trends in UI and UX design
• Optimize the app according to business goals
• Refactor the app and make technical updates

To do this, we decided to not only change the visual style of the app but also to rethink the user experience and some technical aspects.
We did the following:

• Made changes to the business logic
• Optimized the user experience
• Introduced a new visual style based on current UI trends and our client’s new brand book
• Updated old app components (libraries, frameworks, tools, etc.)
• Developed new features

To start, we involved one of our business analysts. She planned all the changes and created a technical specification for new features along with wireframes.

Our client, our project and delivery managers, and our team of developers participated in creating these documents as stakeholders.

As the scope of tasks was rather large, we encountered a few challenges.

Challenges

We faced marketing and technical challenges while redesigning our client’s parcel delivery app.

1. Prioritizing screens according to our client’s marketing goals. Some features had too many screens, and we needed to reduce their number while preserving all important information. Some features had too much information on a single screen, and we needed to divide them meaningfully and increase the conversion rate. Here are a few examples:

• The checkout had three screens: a login and confirmation screen, pick-up location screen, and payment screen. Each screen contained an important step, but the analytics showed that some users didn’t make it to the last screen.
• The onboarding screen was, on the contrary, too cluttered: a user needed to fill in all data on just one screen. This scared off some users, as they needed to spend much time on onboarding.

2. Estimating all redesign activities was a challenge, as changes affected various components of the application that could require refactoring or updates. Our developers needed time to analyze the whole application and determine how they could create new features in Swift and make them work with the existing Objective-C code. This made it harder to estimate an exact number of hours needed to make changes.

3. Determining current trends in UI. To make sure the new design was up-to-date and corresponded to modern trends, we needed to conduct thorough market and competitor research.

4. Implementing new features in a new programming language. The whole application was written in Objective-C, but our client wanted to make a shift to Swift for new features, as it’s a more modern and effective language.

5. Changing the UX was a challenge because the application was large. Our developers needed to change some parts of the architecture to make sure the new UX worked well and didn’t create conflicts with other parts of the app.

Solutions

Now it’s time to find out how we managed to overcome all these challenges and redesign the application.

First, our business analyst worked with our client’s marketing department to perform marketing and competitor research to make sure changes to the design and user experience were consistent with current trends.

Our business analyst formalized all requirements for the new design, new features, and changes. To create a technical documentation, she communicated with developers and project managers to estimate the changes accurately. Our developers and project managers included risks in the estimate on account of the age of some parts of the app.

To make onboarding easier, we divided all input fields by their importance. We placed required fields on the first screen and optional fields on the second screen so users could skip them

Simultaneously, our developers analyzed the whole application and decided which parts they could rewrite and integrate with Swift. As the app consists of separate blocks, most parts were left written in Objective-C. Other new features and UX elements were implemented in Swift and integrated into the system seamlessly. To make sure everything worked properly, our QA specialists performed full regression testing.

To prioritize the screens and make the user experience more friendly, we involved our UX designer and a business analyst. They performed market and competitor research and then presented wireframes for the new screens and business logic for the app.

To make onboarding easier, we divided all input fields by their importance. We placed required fields on the first screen and optional fields on the second screen so users could skip them. This made onboarding much faster.

For the checkout feature, we reduced the number of screens to make the customer journey faster. We implemented two screens instead of three, merging information from the first and second screens.

All this made our client’s app refreshed and convenient.

The results

We successfully updated the application, planned and developed new features in the Swift language, and integrated them into the Objective-C app. As the result of our work, our client’s application became more competitive on the market due to the new design and improved user experience.

We also helped our client increase brand awareness, as the updated application matches the visual style of the renewed offline delivery departments.

It took around four months to conduct research, create a technical specification, wireframes, and designs, and implement all the changes. Here are all the team members that participated and the number of hours they spent:

Related project

Commercial International Logistics Application

A customer-facing native app for tracking and managing parcels

Project details