CASE STUDIES
Digitalization for services provider
Our client, Expert Worker, is a cleaning services provider, offering their services to homes and various business locations like offices, healthcare facilities, warehouses, or spaces involved in the food industry. They offer a variety of cleaning services, from simple maintenance cleaning to construction site cleanups and complete sanitization, with respect to international ISO standards.
Our client decided to invest in digitalizing his company’s workflows in order to streamline the task management for the workers, to improve the communication with his clients and further increase the quality of the services. Down the road, our client also plans to sell the product to similar service providers.
THE CHALLENGE
THE CHALLENGE
The first issue we had to tackle is a common one for many digital transformation attempts: the tendency to focus on the advantages the company would derive from centralizing the data – only considering the leadership’s perspective – but ignoring the needs of the majority of the users, the ones responsible for the input data.
This faulty approach usually generates apps that require too much effort from the target segment. People have a natural resistance to change. When this change also makes their life harder while offering no personal benefits, the resulting app would look great in theory, but will fail in real life: nobody will have “the time” to use it.
We had to reach a balance between what would be reasonable to request from the workers to input, versus how detailed would be the reports we could generate for the leadership. We also had to prioritize the features in such way that the main segment would also benefit from using the app.
We also thought about future bug fixing and app vitals tracking. To make the experience as seamless and easy to users as possible, so as to not interfere with their daily tasks, we had to find a solution that wouldn’t add extra responsibilities for the user (bug reporting, giving feedback etc…). Being non-invasive was also important for us.
Another challenge resulted from our client’s desire to sell the app to other businesses that would offer their services on customers’ location, but not necessarily for the cleaning sector. Satisfying a larger number of user segments usually results in complexity within the app, triggering the problem of flexibility – usability tradeoff: as the flexibility of a system increases, its usability decreases.
We again had to find a solution that would not complicate the interaction cost, but still offer the customization required by the different businesses.
This requirement also brought numerous technical challenges. Developing a product that acts as a clean slate, ready to be tailored to each client’s unique needs, demanded a fully flexible and dynamic design. Additionally, this placed extra demands on the server and the administration page, which became the primary sources of data for the mobile app.
THE SOLUTION
We decided on 2 applications: a web app that would serve as a dashboard for the administrator and a cross-platform mobile app that adapts to the two types of users: clients and workers.
We decided to create the web & mobile application with React and React Native respectively. Using these mature and tested frameworks helped us create stable and scalable applications. For the server, we decided to implement it using Supabase as a database solution and Apollo/GraphQL technologies to make efficient and scalable communication possible between all these parts of our product.
With the help of React Native, combined with the new features of Expo services, we could create a cross-platform mobile application with a single code base. This drastically decreased development times, and made it possible for use to implement the following functionalities with ease:
- The workers would use the mobile app to see which clients and sites they need to visit in a day, what jobs/tasks they would need to perform on the specific locations, and communicate with the respective clients. Their interaction with the app was planned to be minimal, and only in key points of their daily schedule.
- The clients would use the app to monitor the progress of ongoing work. If dissatisfied, they could request revisions or initiate new emergency tasks directly with the on-site workers.
- The admin would be responsible for configuring the client’s service zones, specifying the tasks required in each zone, and assigning these tasks to workers. The admin would have access to immediate, detailed feedback on daily operations, as well as a high-level overview through various reports on clients and workers.
To create a bug free experience, we used Sentry. An edge-cutting technology/service that helps us track bugs in-production. An important reason for us, and why we went with Sentry, was that it is very minimally invasive. It doesn’t track users (in-app or otherwise), and automatically censors every sensitive data. It also doesn’t store personal data anywhere.
To accomodate for a mobile application capable of adapting its UI and UX not only based on the type of user logged in but also on the type of business utilizing it, required minimizing hardcoded values, texts, and even certain UI elements. We managed to fulfill these extra demands while also keeping the code scalable and maintainable.
QR code scan on spaces
Using the mobile application, workers scan QR codes assigned to each zone to view the required tasks. Upon completion, they mark the tasks as done. This streamlined process allows us to automate several operations, minimizing workers’ app interactions and reducing potential user errors, offering:
- Clear visibility of task statuses: completed, pending, or in progress;
- No overlap between workers, no redundancy;
- Ability to gather data on time spent at client locations and workers’ routes;
Flexible job requests
Each client has a set of recurrent jobs defined in his contract, set up in our web dashboard by the administrator. Beside these, the clients can request new tasks, for example to cover an emergency situation. The workers can also decide that some jobs are needed, even if they do not appear in their required list of tasks that day.
This flexibility allows better catering for the everyday needs and changes that occur in a busy environment.
Prioritized task overview
Both workers and clients can see what was done and what remains to be done in a certain day. The jobs are prioritized, showing the order of the locations and the order of the jobs within a location.
This allows clear expectations from the clients, and increased efficiency from the workers.
Notifications and messages
In order to increase the visibility of unexpected requests from the clients, the workers receive notifications announcing them if the client is not happy about a job or an emergency task is required.
The client will communicate with the admin if they would want permanent changes to their contract. The admin is also notified if a client’s request is left unsatisfied by a worker.
All parties can exchange messages to clarify various situations necessary to take their next decision.
Reports
The admin has a variety of reports helping him understand his workers and his clients, and take informed decisions about his business. The reports can be daily, weekly or monthly providing:
- A comprehensive overview of clients, including completed jobs for each client across all zones, categorized by contracted tasks, new requests, or redo requests;
- A detailed summary of worker activity, listing the tasks completed by each worker;
- Insights into requested services;
Individual nomenclature
In order to allow for a variety of businesses to use the app, the services are custom defined. Services can then be added to various packages – to simplify adding them on clients’ contracts.
This would allow different businesses to use the service they offer in the configuration that makes sense for them.
THE RESULTS
We developed a web application, and the mobile app is available for download on both the App Store, Play Store (and soon on App Gallery).
- A reliable application package that is not only easy to use, works on iOS and Android, but can also be closely monitored remotely, without relying on the user’s manual feedback. Sentry services help us monitor the health of our application and pinpoint problems if they ever arise, sometimes even without the knowledge of the users. This ensures that we provide a smooth user experience at all times.
- An administration dashboard that can be used to configure and set up our product in a way that it can serve multiple types of businesses’ needs & requirements. This lets our client manage his business as he sees fit, without the need for our interference.
- A cost conscious & modern mobile application that is developed from a single code base, decreasing development times, and ultimately, client costs. Using the latest versions of React and React Native enabled us to stay on the edge of new technologies and develop an application that can stand the test of time in our rapidly evolving world.
- Performant products that rely on the latest technologies and solutions, developed by a small but skilled team of developers. Using technologies such as Expo, Apollo, Supabase helped our developers achieve big goals with reasonable efforts.
- A user experience that feels natural – our mobile application is as intuitive as possible, we don’t want users to spend their time learning it. Our administration dashboard is efficient, as we aim to provide as much data as possible with as little hassle as possible.
