Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?
Our app is currently a pilot. Although you can download it from the App Store, it’s really meant to be sold to schools, and then the schools give it to their students for free, it’s not a retail app. Some school systems have a very long lead time. We are in a pilot in 10 different schools, and we are working with counselors to get it to students. The overall feedback of the look, feel, and information provided has been extremely well received both for students and for counselors.
We show it to people in the education industry, and they are blown away by the tone of our videos. They like how they resonate with the students, how easy it is to navigate, how we explain financial literacy concepts that previously students weren’t able to understand, and the way we broke it up into missions with defined starts and ends. I think people appreciate that because it is a long process and breaking it up into smaller chunks is always helpful.
How did Blue Label Labs perform from a project management standpoint?
Blue Label Labs did a fantastic job. They are in New York, and their development team was in India. I would say that I didn’t feel that at all. As a customer, that’s what you want. You don’t really care where your development is being done. I feel like their project management set the expectations well. They followed through with commitments well and communicated next steps and timelines well. They made the backend development and QA efforts almost immaterial. I never had to talk to a developer. Everything went smoothly with the project management team. To me, that was a very good feeling to have, that I could just go to my one point of contact, and they would handle it from there.
What did you most impressive about Blue Label Labs?
I can’t necessarily compare them to other providers because I don’t have the experience as far as to app building, but I can compare them to other consultancy teams that I have worked with. I felt that they were innovative in terms of how they approached the problem, how they encouraged us to build paper prototypes, and really go through the app before we did any development. They created these insanely large screen flow maps, and we put them up on the wall. There are almost 500 screens in the app, and I had every single screen and arrows going to and from every screen based on what actions they took up on my wall. I was able to modify the user experience before we did any coding. I don’t know how differential that makes them for their ability to prototype that, but I appreciated that that was the process they took with it.
Are there any areas Blue Label Labs could improve?
Blue Label Labs could have had more transparency and communication around actual burn rate vs budget. However, I can't get too upset. Although the project management and requirement scoping went over budget, Blue Label stuck by their original estimate and did not bill me the overcharges. My scope of work did not change but did require more effort than they originally thought.
Blue Label Labs was only complimented after the completion of the project. The app has been well received by users and all other stakeholders were satisfied with the outcome. This client highlights the relationship BLL built with their team as a standout.