Since 2011, APPrise Mobile has been providing enterprise customers, including Toyota and Caesars Entertainment, with a white-label native app platform for mobile communications. In the fall of 2017, APPrise came to Checkmate to help scale their corporate communications software company from a startup with a handful of Fortune 500 customers to a global digital company that could provide unique solutions to their enterprise clients.
Checkmate was asked to solve two unique problems, the first being to help the APPrise development team streamline their efficiency in day-to-day operations, and create development operations processes to allow the engineering team to have a framework to follow as their internal team expanded during the company’s rapid growth.
The second problem was that APPrise’s clients were frequently requesting a way to understand engagement and metrics related to the usage of their white-label native app, and what types of shared content within the app was most popular among users. Many of these enterprise clients requested an analytics dashboard to be built into their current employee communication so that they could get the insights they needed.
Before we could start creating processes and building custom dev tools, we had to first understand what would work best for the APPrise dev team. We spent a day at the APPrise office speaking with their CTO and development team to understand their current technology stack, and what processes they were currently using to maintain and build integrations for their existing platform.
In order to satisfy the need for in-app user engagement data, we designed and developed an analytics dashboard front-end that integrated into APPrise’s existing back-end platform. APPrise needed this solution deployed quickly, as this was a highly requested feature from their clients. The dashboard included tables, charts, and content engagement for administrators of the social network.
An easy-to-use interface was created so that APPrise’s clients could understand app usage behavior metrics and generate reports to inform company executives about overall employee engagement and health. Using the Generate function, an admin can generate a customized report based on activity and type, and can choose which metrics to view. In addition, user flows were streamlined through the use of clearly labelled components to help new and existing customers understand how they are using the platform.
We created a simple design with a grayscale color palette and minimal branding and labels to be adaptable for white-label solutions. The grayscale palette gives the platform a clean look while also circumventing the issue of having colors that may clash with a particular company’s branding. However, some customization is available to company administrators by giving them the ability to add their logo to the top left corner of the page.
The home screen was designed to be accommodated by thirds. The design allowed for one component to be stretched across the screen, a two to one split, and for three columns of equal width to be on the page. These elements were turned into a search bar, an activity filter and report generator, and separate report categories for an admin to view. Thanks to these elements and a sidebar that lists activity categories and more, navigating around the app is quick and easy.
The layout displays several assets that our developers could customize depending on what was needed in a particular section. Each page has a grid view that reuses tables, charts, and other elements throughout the app. Using a component-based library and reusable UI elements allowed for developer efficiency while ensuring a fast, responsive UX.
We built an interactive prototype in InvisionApp that demonstrated how the app would function. Once this prototype was approved, we built custom development tools using React, GRPC, and Postgres. We chose React, a component-based View framework, to render components on the app pages because it let our developers reuse code throughout the site for faster development, and because it easily organized the project. Network protocol GRPC was used to define how the APPrise servers communicated with each other and was important for security. Postgres, a relational table-based database, gave our development team the ability to store analytics events in a large table and to quickly index those events on the dashboard.
“Checkmate helped augment our design and development teams to deliver a highly requested and critical feature. Our clients are thrilled to be seeing a simple analytics dashboard with a sleek new interface.”
— Doug Pierce
COO, APPrise Mobile
The platform was integrated into APPrise Mobile’s theEMPLOYEEapp in Summer 2018, and is currently being rolled out to their clients.
