BRIEF

tiqbiz is a mobile app designed for schools, which enables them to engage with parents by keeping them informed of events and activities occurring at their school. First launched in 2012, Blue Cottage was brought on board a year later to create tiqbiz 5 – a major rewrite of the original iOS and Android mobile apps.

In the following years and with the launch of tiqbiz 5, they were able to bring on board over 600 schools in Australia, and expand overseas to the UK, India, Europe, and North America.

With their success, in 2015 they started work on tiqbiz 6 – a scalable rewrite of their platform, and a complete facelift of their mobile apps.

WIREFRAMING

Before any code was written, a wireframe was created. Because tiqbiz is an existing app, it was easy to talk to customers and look through analytics, to see which features were used most and to optimise for them.

The main goal was to reduce the number of taps to get to the most used screens – which were the schools Newsfeed (which showed previous and upcoming school events), school notifications, and One2one chats (direct chats between parents and staff).

PROTOTYPING/DESIGN

Once the wireframes were completed, designs and dynamic prototypes were created and deployed to Marvel – a tool which allows users to install a pixel perfect representation of an app on their phone or tablet, without having to write a single line of code.

This allowed us to quickly and heavily iterate on the designs and app flow until we were satisfied. The staple of good design is iteration, and we’ve found that iterating in this phase is significantly quicker and easier to do than in development.

DEVELOPMENT

With wireframes, designs, and a prototype created, development was very straight forward. Using a variation of the Scrum Agile methodology – releases were scheduled, a bug tracking system used to priorities bugs, and group chats to keep all developers and project staff up to date on progress and issues encountered.

SUPPORT AND MAINTENANCE

After release, unlike other agencies, Blue Cottage stayed on board with tiqbiz with a support contract, and provides support and maintenance on the tiqbiz mobile apps.  This not only includes bug fixes, but also monitoring crash reports, analytics, and proactively surveying the mobile landscape, and making recommendations on features and issues which could arise.