Mobilise

COUNTRY United Kingdom
INDUSTRY Carers Community
PEOPLE INVOLVED 7

The Challenge

There are thousands of unpaid carers across the UK and in the EU. Their situation is often tough. Care-related work overload, constant dedication and sacrifice of their time and needs are their challenging reality. Mobilise was designed and built with support for them in mind. It is a platform for the community of unpaid carers, facilitating connections with peers who just want to talk with someone who ‘gets it’.

The challenge was to prepare a Progressive Web App (PWA) that would allow for seamless communication with other unpaid carers in the community. Another must-have was related to a built-in survey feature that would run, gather and analyse data from the users, with a clear UX and solid administration panel.

Feedback from project stakeholders

We believe that cooperation can be effective and can be a great adventure of realizing common goals.

ASPER BROTHERS worked collaboratively with us throughout our project. The process was really well structured for both non-technical and technical staff and kept us up to date on project progression. It was great to access this much expertise and experience in one place in such a simple way.

Joe Legate, Head of Growth, Mobilise

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How it works

The app and newsletter of Mobilise is full of tips and tricks, insights from the community and relevant advice – from carers to carers. It helps them with daily, practical challenges, provides support options nearby, takes the weight off their mind and puts a smile on their faces – it’s as simple as that!

The application was developed to handle regular, mass surveying of the unpaid carers’ community in order to gather data related to their situation. Meaningful insights derived from this data are then used as leverage to facilitate communication with and between users. The PWA, focused rather on mobile devices, is minimalistic and simple to use, with a clean UX and intuitive interface.

Design & UX

The scope of Mobilise was to have a modern, fresh look in a short time. We had few online meetings with the marketing head and the product manager, discussing how the App should appear to the final users.

The best option in these cases is to use a library such as Material Design from Google. It supports you with a basic design kit and components. Also, it provides you with high-quality standards for building digital experiences for web or native Apps. In our case, Mobilise is a web App available on mobile, tablet, and desktop.

The final design is a simple and accessible layout, with large buttons and easy-to-read texts. The necessity of long descriptions required not to overcrowd the single pages with many contents. We stuck with the colors from the brand manual, and we used two web fonts from Google Fonts.

The primary tool we used to design the prototype is Figma (a web-based application, useful for real-time collaborations and good commentary tool). We work with it in all our UI and UX projects – with Miro’s help (online whiteboard tool) in UX workshops.

The Technology behind

We approached the delivery in a startup-like manner, with sprint-end demos, daily standups and constant slack communication with the customer. Together we planned a UI/UX design and a relevant architecture of the PWA.

Whenever possible, we looked for options to reuse existing components instead of building each feature from scratch. For example, we integrated Typeform as a complex survey handling solution, Twilio as an SMS tool and Sendgrid to do the mass mailing.

We used PHP with its Laravel framework to build a solid backend foundation of the app. It works well in combination with React, HTML and CSS on the front, making the app even more user-friendly. We used MySQL as a database solution and introduced Laravel Nova as an admin panel. As a platform foundation, AWS was chosen as a cloud infrastructure provider to introduce scalability on demand.