Software for the job in front of you
Most businesses already run on software. It is just spread across spreadsheets, inboxes, a booking tool, a payment page and somebody's memory. A web app pulls the important part of that into one place that your customers or your staff can use from any browser.
We have built customer accounts and sign-up flows, a driver app that works offline in a van, editorial back offices, a match centre for football fans and a wishlist app with a browser extension. They have one thing in common: each one replaced a process that people were doing by hand.
How we build a web app
- Start with the people. Who uses it, on what device, and what are they trying to finish? A driver with gloves on needs different screens from an office manager on a laptop.
- Prototype the risky part first. If the hard bit is routing, payments or a data feed, we prove that before we design forty screens around it.
- Release in small pieces. You use real software early, on a staging copy, and we change it while change is cheap.
- Test what matters. Money, data and anything a customer sees gets automated tests. Our larger platforms run thousands of them, and a failing test stops a deploy.
- Launch with a way back. Every release keeps a route back to the one before, so a bad deploy can be reversed quickly.
A worked example: the van
For Doorstep Glass Recycling we built a driver app as part of the platform. It shows the round in order, records every collection or miss with a reason, takes a photo and a note, and keeps working when the signal drops, queuing actions on the phone until it reconnects. A van whose MOT, tax or insurance has expired cannot start a round, and a daily walkaround check is part of the start-up.
None of that is clever on its own. Together it means the office knows what happened on every street without a phone call.
Phones, apps and stores
We build for the phone first. A web app can be installed from the browser to the home screen, send notifications and work offline where the job needs it, without an App Store review. When store apps are worth having, as they were for Visit Dundee, we wrap the same web app so there is still one codebase to look after.
Not sure if you need an app at all? Read web app or website: how to tell.