Alty

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

They produced a really great prototype within two weeks. Their designer is really smart and possibly the most experienced guy I’ve ever met in Ukraine. Their user testing techniques saved us a lot of time and money. We don’t need to rebuild a lot of features.

We stopped the project with Alty because we had a financial limit. Our in-house team has taken it over, and we’re in the final delivery stage. In a month, we will publish our applications and I’ll have metrics then. 

I believe it will be great. Now, we have a working website along with the mobile version. Most problems that decrease the conversion rate are solved in the app.

How did Alty perform from a project management standpoint?

The project management was normal. I was in contact with the project manager for any issues. We used a chat to communicate.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They do design particularly well. The design is really cool and top-notch.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, there’s nothing I’d have them improve.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I don’t have any advice.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We have an internal IT consultant who did an initial assessment of the code and advised that it could be accepted as it was. It had a few bugs, which were corrected. I didn’t have any problems in terms of communicating about and fixing those.

How did Alty perform from a project management standpoint?

We were pressed for time, but there were no delays, and everything was done according to the schedule. Our communication is quite good—if the project manager doesn’t have an answer to my question, he brings it to the team and then gets back to me. It’s convenient to have one point of communication to address all my concerns.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We plan to assess the final code one more time, but so far, I cannot find anything that I could report as negative. We’re happy with them, and we’ll continue the collaboration.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We only worked on development, so I cannot speak about areas like UI/UX design. They used a very strong developer for the work and I have no improvement areas to mention.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

They’re quite flexible, in terms of being able to work on either a fixed budget or an hourly basis. Someone that wants to work with them should sit down and be as detailed and specific as possible about what should be in the scope of work.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

The work they’ve done has been a great success. In the six months that the app’s been live, we already have 250,000 customers and growing by 2,500 customers per day. We have great reviews from the Android and iOS stores, many of which point out our exceptional UI.

How did Alty perform from a project management standpoint?

Alty’s communication is just as strong as its design work. They were able to express their knowledge of UI and UX while still taking into consideration our business perspective.

They also kept in regular contact with us; we had meetings about once a week while also communicating daily via WhatsApp.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’re able to communicate with and take input from everyone involved in a project without compromising the quality of their finished product. I really appreciated their willingness to incorporate everyone’s perspective.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Trust Alty’s ability to make great products and consider them a part of your team, not just designers who take direction. If you involve the team in your decision-making process, they have a better idea of your goals, which enables them to tailor the UI and UX to your customers.

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

It’s not the type of application that's open to the general public, so traffic is not a good general indicator for us. We’re an enterprise software business so we only sell to people that are subscribed to our platform and can access it. The key indicator for me and the reason why I got them onboard was that I needed a specific project done with a definitive go-live date, which was this past week. Alty was very committed to my timeline and did a good job, even when it took ramping up from one to four developers. They found the resources to make it happen within my timeline while preserving a reasonable quality of work and a QA process. We did go live with that product a week ago. So far, it’s working.

How did Alty perform from a project management standpoint?

Alty fared well. When you get a firm and outsource this type of work offshore, there's a chance of language barriers and different time zones. Then it's very critical to see that there are a good workflow and project management discipline in place, which they had.

Alty had some tools they used in the past, and we have some of our own that we want to use. On the design side, we went to their choice of Basecamp for the project management. We used InVision for design feedback loops. On the engineering side, we have an infrastructure that we prefer—JIRA for project management and Bitbucket for code repository.

What did you find most impressive about Alty?

Alty's team takes pride in their work, which is very difficult to find. It's hard enough to find it in your own employees, so it's very hard to find outside. Their commitment is not just to a timeline or project tasks, but they're committed to doing things well. That's a big differentiator.

Are there any areas Alty could improve?

I've had a really good experience so far. For the types of things that we stumbled on, I wouldn't necessarily fault them for it because it's the function of getting things done with an offshore shop. There are many things that they don't have a cultural context for. They don't live here; they're not the average American, so they don't necessarily know the concepts that will resonate. It’s hard to expect a Ukrainian shop to have that native understanding of that. It was our role in this type of process is to be able to educate someone like them on our product, the environment in which we operate, the type of users that use our stuff, and the types of things they may think or care about.

It was also getting a rhythm of communication in place. Because we had a tight timeline, it was imperative for us to get people to build rapport quickly. That took some effort initially, but I think we got to a good phase quickly enough. We were working on a very tight timeline. We had three months to launch, and they made it happen.

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

I don't have any numbers off the top of my head, but we have experienced a lower bounce rate on the cart checkout step. We also track negative feedback from sellers and buyers and saw a significant drop there as well. People have a better understanding of our site's transaction process.

How did Alty perform from a project management standpoint?

Alty's team was very easy to work with. Their approach is user-friendly and it takes geographic differences into consideration.

What did you find most impressive about Alty?

We've appreciated Alty's responsiveness and timeliness. The schedule was fully discussed and everything was delivered on time.

Are there any areas Alty could improve?

Most of the work went okay, but there were a few pages which even we didn't know how to implement. We have different offers and promotions to manage and wanted to create a unified design. There was a lot of back and forth with Alty's team, and there was one section in particular which I thought could have been done better. We eventually came to a satisfactory design, but it took more time than expected.

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

Our metrics are confidential. Here’s a link to some press on the launch of the service.

What did you find most impressive about Alty?

We don’t typically work with outside partners.

Are there any areas Alty could improve?

None.

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

Everything was on time. The quality was great. We would be happy to work with them again in the future.

What distinguishes Alty from other providers?

The Alty team is extremely flexible, and they work to find the best solution for each client.

In hindsight, are there areas in which they could improve or things you might do differently?

No. There is nothing I can think of. Everything was good.

How did Alty perform from a project management standpoint?

The Alty team has really careful development processes in place, so it was always transparent to us what was going on.

What distinguishes Alty from other providers?

Their attention to detail and focus on processes is what stands out most about Alty. They have this great iterative process for gathering the requirements for the design, they give you feedback, and they do testing and give you the ability to test the application.

Is there anything Alty could have improved or done differently?

We only had one problem that showed up late in the project; it was just one bug. They were so far along without any issues, so it wasn’t a big problem.

What distinguishes Alty from other providers?

Alty knows how to balance between hearing the client, the client’s wants, and mixing those with their professional opinion. Sometimes, when your contractor listens to what you want and just does as you say, the result is bad because you don’t get that professional input. That’s one extreme and the other extreme is when your designer doesn’t consider any of the client’s input. Then you have results that you don’t want because it’s not the project that you envisioned in your mind. Alty can balance their input and our input strongly. They listen carefully and then they add their experience on top of our ideas.

Is there anything Alty could have improved or done differently?

I think it’s the time that they need to finish a project. In my opinion, they’re not very fast, but maybe it’s a downside of their detailed approach. They try to find out as much as they can about an area, and they work to do a lot of interviews with our customers and bank branch managers. Those efforts are time consuming. They do a lot of testing and that’s also time consuming. I wish that everything was a bit faster, but I’m not sure if it’s possible. 

Is there anything unique or special about Alty that really makes them stand out compared to other business partners?

We liked that not only did Alty execute the task at hand, they also thought creatively. Sometimes, they suggested some alternative solutions to our original design. They suggested some new things, and there were many times when their suggestions were the best solution. Alty did their job, and they overperformed. We really appreciated their attitude.

Looking back on the work so far, is there any area that you think they could improve upon or that you might do differently?

There was a minor issue when we had a couple of months with very low amount of work to be done on their end. They switched to another project and, when we needed them, it was a very slow switch back to our project. So, this led to a small window of time that they were slow on their reaction on our tasks. However, when they were back on track, everything was fine.