More Cobalt

The Brief

Provide a comprehensive refurb of the web and app offering of the employee discount scheme More Cobalt, which gives exclusive offers and information to over 14,000 people who work in the diverse range of companies based in the UK’s largest business park.

 

Our Solution

The user interface had remained the same for several years and there was a strong need to provide a distinct new look and a highly accessible UI to give a considerably improved user experience. 

The website was built using HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript (ES6), to give a highly responsive website design. Likewise, with the mobile app, there was an emphasis on providing a responsive design, with Typescript and Ionic Native being employed to achieve this.  

We also had to deal with significant technical legacy issues early in the development process. The systems inherited were disjointed, and time was taken to merge these so that the web and app content could be controlled from the same platform. The unified control platform was constructed in Django, and the programming realised in Python. It involved data migration and merging. This was achieved with no data loss, highly significant when working with a system containing the information of over 14,000 More Cobalt users.     

Traveline API data was integrated onto the platform to provide Bus and Metro information to Cobalt workers. Significantly, the bus data is live, allowing users to access real-time information for the variety of stops in the Park complex, making it easy to plan their travel.

Another technical innovation of the mobile app is the implementation of Geofence technology. With location sharing enabled on the app, it can determine if there are any partner businesses of the More Cobalt scheme near the app user. It will then send a push notification to the user, reminding them of the offers that they can currently take advantage of.