Indigo: US Kiosk and Internal Tooling
Services: Fullstack Engineering and Mobile Development / Timeline: 6 months / Location: Short Hills, New Jersey
Overview
In 2018, Indigo opened its first US location. We were tasked with developing its most customer-facing application from scratch, the kiosk. The brand new concept was based on a large, portrait-mode touchscreen display.
We architected the kiosk for zero downtime by developing a web application using a serverless frontend built in React.js. To this day, the application has had over 99.999% uptime.
We tailored a custom javascript keyboard in order to stay on-brand, and adapted web API’s to a physical barcode scanner to mimic hardware-like functionality that Indigo’s customers have come to expect from their kiosk.
We delivered both ahead of schedule and within budget despite only having 6 months to build a brand new concept from scratch - from paper concepts to hitting the retail floor.
In the end, we were also asked to help develop internal tooling to curate “Heather’s Picks”, as well as a native mobile app for retail on-the-floor staff.
The Challenge
Indigo approached us because time was of the essence, and rapid development was required to meet operational deadlines. They didn’t have the resources internally to iterate quickly enough. Within 6 months, the kiosk needed to be transformed from designs to a production-ready kiosk fit for retail customers.
The new form concept, a touchscreen device in portrait mode, needed to have virtually 100% uptime, and work similar to the hardware-based kiosk that customers had been using for over 10 years already.
How did we develop a retail kiosk from scratch, including a custom javascript keyboard and barcode scanner, that was ready to deploy within 6 months?
How did we leverage existing patterns to also develop internal mobile apps, and a curation tool for the marketing department as well, unexpectedly during the last 2 months?
Our Process
Define Your “Must Haves”
Since the kiosk would be the single most customer-facing application, uptime needed to be guaranteed. We already knew that Indigo’s designers valued pixel-perfect frontend and wanted the smooth transitions of a single-page app (SPA), so we decided to make our React.js app serverless - that is, a single javascript file that required no backend whatsoever, which could be hosted in a filestore (i.e. AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, etc.) entirely by itself. This proved to be the right choice, and allowed for easy deployment, independent of all other API’s and services.
Then, Choose the Right Technology
The time saved from creating a serverless frontend would prove important in the final 2 months, as we were also asked to create a native mobile app for retail staff. Since we were already familiar with all of the API’s that powered the kiosk, and the device that retail staff would be using was still to be determined, we chose to translate the kiosk code into React Native, rather than building anew using Swift. Our familiarity with the framework, and React Native’s ability to compile to different screen sizes, as well as both Android and iOS, proved useful because a change in devices was in fact required at the last minute.
Iterate and Leave Time to Perfect
Despite a hectic schedule, our group’s experience with rapid development left us with some time to perfect the end product with Indigo’s designers, QA, and retail staff.
We even had time to experiment with improving accessibility using speech recognition - “Hey Indigo”. A feature-flagged branch of the kiosk source code allows for natural language style search, enabling customers with visual difficulties to interact with the kiosk entirely via voice commands.
“Hey Indigo! Find books by Jane Austen”
The Outcome
We delivered both ahead of schedule and within budget despite only having 6 months to build a brand new concept from scratch - from design to hitting the retail floor.
In the end, we were also asked to help develop internal tooling to curate “Heather’s Picks”, as well as a native mobile app for retail on-the-floor staff.
We really enjoyed working with Indigo, and to this day, still count them as one our best clients.