Appening

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am Director of a Energy Consulting upstart with HQ in Melbourne. We offer a range of services to our clients from Business advisory, Risk Assessment, Project Management to Delivery.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Appening?

We engaged Appening to provide Testing and Automation Testing for our client.

What were your goals for this project?

Our SME Client, due to budget constraints, had a band of Developers who were constantly building code and deploying to Production without much Quality Assurance. The client needed to be ensured that the code was quality and stable prior to each Release.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

Appening was a reference.

Describe the project in detail.

The Client has a Solar Business for which they were developing a bespoke web based application. The QA resource's role (from Appening) was to understand the requirements, manually do the testing during each Sprint and at the end of the Sprint deliver Automation Testing Scripts.

What was the team composition?

Appening provided 1 x QA resource who was part of the Client DevOps team of 5 resources and was doing operating autonomously managing end to end QA process. This resource was the only QA resource in the team.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

The Client was ecstatic with the value they were getting out of the QA activity. The Post Release defects reduced to 50% in a matter of 4 months. The time required by a non-Tester client's resource to execute Regression Testing was reduced from 3 hrs to 15 mins by way of execution of the Automation Scripts for the Regression test cases.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Appening resource was very flexible in regards to working hours and would mostly start early to have maximum overlap with the Client's team. There would be a daily stand-up and the usual Agile ceremonies to which the QA reosurce was part of.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The Appening resource understood the client's bespoke software fairly quickly and took ownership and accountability of the end to end testing practice without much intricate knowledge of the client's business operations.

Are there any areas for improvement?

The Client was very impressed with the delivery and kept extending the engagement from what started as a 2 months term ended up to be almost 17 months.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Its Truemployer and I am the co-founder.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Appening?

for the UI UX desing and HTML development of the pages.

What were your goals for this project?

To have the best UI/UX designs that operate dynamically according to the ratings given by users in our website.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

I saw Appening as one of the hot teams on dribbble and approached them.

Describe the project in detail.

We provide analytical insights for the employees on how the employers are meeting the needs and in short, the employee engagement and retention rate based on user ratings.

What was the team composition?

When I approached them it was a couple of UI UX designers. And once the designs got ready, we extended the contract to do the HTML part of the pages they designed. This is where an extra person got involved from their end.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

They designed the prototypes for initial review within 2 weeks of time. Later with our feedback, they made changes. We hired them for a total of 8 pages in our website some of them being our core use case pages. They delivered everything on time and also we would be working with them in the future for upgrades and changes in design and development.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

We are always in contact on skype and whatsapp. They have been available almost every time though our time zones are different. As soon as they finished their part for each page they delivered them in sprints. Once we got them, we moved them to development phase in our end.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They have a great work ethic and discipline. They delivered stuff on time and most importantly, they actually provided a quality content. I have hired other UI UX designers inthe past but these guys actually met our expectations.

Are there any areas for improvement?

I think the team is really balanced. They are expanding their development team quite rapidly and also, we are thinking to move our test and production phase to them in the coming months.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the CTO and Co-founder for Drivewayz where I manage a team of software engineers to develop and test our software capabilities on a wide range of customers throughout the US. Drivewayz is a mobile platform that allows property owners to rent out their private parking spaces to drivers who are searching for cheaper and more convenient options. We are working to reduce traffic in large urban cities as well as use data analytics to help cities adjust to a growing population.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Appening?

We are a new startup and wanted to move from a wireframe product to a modern and professional looking mobile app that would attract users.

What were your goals for this project?

We were hoping to improve our overall user experience as well as create an array of graphics that we could use throughout the application.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

I found Mahima and Appening through the website Behance.com and loved a majority of her work. We selected her because of how closely her brand identity matched our envisioned idea of what we wanted.

Describe the project in detail.

We gave Mahima about 12 different screens that we wanted redone as well as a list of specific graphics to be used throughout. The screens were all internal to the application itself and walked the user through the overall booking process to reserve a parking space.

We also had her completely redo our on-boarding process including a text verification page. She also built out a new settings and navigation screen for us. Lastly she created nine graphics each for the specific type of parking space as well as multiple on-boarding graphics that have been used throughout the application.

What was the team composition?

We specifically asked to be paired with Mahima so she was our primary point of contact for this project.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

As of now we have not received any analytical data on the new UI/UX design versus the old, however since implementing we have gained over 600 new users and expanded to 4 different states throughout the US.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

The progress was very consistent and timely. We had no communication issues or major delays throughout the project.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

I was most impressed at Mahima's ability to take minimal information and direction from us and turn it into a full on brand identity that she maintained throughout all of the screens and graphics. The vendor’s timeliness and attention to detail were much appreciated.

Are there any areas for improvement?

The only area we would like to improve would be aligning the idea that these graphics portray with our own company ideas slightly more, however things like that generally take much more time and a closer relationship to the company than can be accomplished in a month.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m a product manager at Symprocity Software. We’re a software development company focused on delivering cutting edge software solutions to government. From large government entities to smaller ones, our goal is to apply our technical expertise to build systems that make government more efficient, agile, and, ultimately, customer focused.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Appening?

We needed help updating one of our inspection management systems—a complete overhaul of the technologies used in the original design.

What were your goals for this project?

The goal was to completely rebuild the entire legacy system, including the UI design. Further, we wanted to add a mobile component to the system.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

After searching for possible partners on online, we came across Appening. Several rounds of conversations and some proof of capabilities helped us decide to go with them for this project.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

They designed, developed, and launched a new front- and backend system for an operational inspection process. The project began with them evaluating the current legacy system, followed by the production of designs for both the UX and UI.

What was the team composition?

The project team included a designer, a UI coder, an architecture team, and a project manager.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

Our customers are pleased with the new system, and we've seen a reduction in requests for support, which was a critical factor in deciding on the upgrade.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

We had a project manager on our side that communicated with a project manager from the Appening team.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

We found the team at Appening to be knowledgeable of and well-versed in numerous technologies. Having in-house designers was a huge benefit.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Thus far, we don’t yet have much in the area of what needs to be improved. It's possible that after a few more projects we may be better able to give such suggestions, however.