Rockhome
Rockhome is a real estate company with the vision to improve the market, the economy, and people's life. Their mobile apps support the real estate agents' daily work, maximizing their productivity in an easy-to-use way.
Challenges
When the client reached us for the first time, there was already a deadline set, but the full scope fortunately wasn't. After walking us through the exact requirements, it became clear that all of the functionality won’t fit into the set deadline. We had to figure out something together with Rockhome to deliver the application in time with the most required features. They were very helpful during the whole process, this phase established the basis of our cooperation for the entire project.
In most cases, by the time of the actual application development, there are already some UI designs created by designers and which were already validated through a lot of iterations of discussing their usability and correctness with the customer. For this project, it was not the case. We were given some very high-level design guidelines with only a handful of actual screen designs for the most common types of screens.
The initial idea was to develop the application for both Android and iOS platforms. At that time, there was no cross-platform technology that was mature enough to develop such an application. We had some knowledge of Flutter, but Flutter had not yet reached its first stable (1.0) version. So we had to find a solution that would allow us to be ready on time and at the same time allow the application to be used by as many users as possible.
Our Solutions
Our Solutions
Since the deadline was tight and we needed additional development resources to deliver on time, we decided to ask for the help of another IT company and outsource part of the development to them. This also meant that we had to work closely with them on a daily basis, as well as a serious estimation and ramp-up period at the beginning of the cooperation. Things worked out well, the cooperation proved to be fruitful during the project.
Since we weren’t given a full design guide, we had to design the look of each screen as part of the development. We did a lot of brainstorming in front of the whiteboard figuring out the most optimal arrangement of UI elements, taking into account all the data to be displayed, often running several rounds with the client, until we arrived at the most satisfactory version for them.
During the development, we used the latest best practices in order to make it easier to expand the application in the future. We followed the application architecture recommended by Google, utilizing a lot of Android Jetpack libraries, thus making our application concise and robust. We kept in mind that in the future the app could be easily ported to other form factors besides tablets, as well as easily translated into other languages.
Results
In the end, it turned out to be the most effective solution if we develop the application only for Android and optimize the UI for a specific type of tablet, and then provide the service to the end users together with the tablet. Since the first edition, the range of users has been constantly expanding, and since then we have been making minor changes to the application based on their valuable feedback.
We planned for the scenario, that we might have to make the application available for phones one day. When the client asked us for this, we were able to make the application work and look good on this form factor with just a few changes and rearrangement of UI elements. The phone version also has an extra function that is only available in this version.
Again, thanks to planning ahead, it was easy for us when Rockhome asked us to create the Bulgarian version of the application as well. At first, we tried to further develop the two apps under a common codebase, introducing conditions where the functionality of the two apps differed. Over time, however, so many differences came to light that justified the fork of the repository, and since then the two applications have lived separate lives.
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