Case Studies

Utilising open source technology to optimise the event planning process with Availabled

Holly Hudson
June 15, 2022

The Brief

Experience Digital was engaged to develop the idea from the design phase where concepts of how event planning could tie into a social and business case through to the development of the initial most viable product (MVP) with the business analysis to back it.

Event planning is needed to support various complex scenarios of calendar synchronisation, instant messaging, and invitation systems all of which are tied into a mobile-specific workflow. The planning of the event could seem tedious but through thorough design feedback loops, an engaging UX was created to help streamline this process.

Our approach

Our approach to this application build project was to workshop all requirements ensuring Experience Digital was the ‘perfect fit’. After two workshops with both Founders and Technical resources, a roadmap was created for Availabled. To support the application, Firebase was used as a platform service to drive the mobile and web applications built in Flutter and React respectively.

Flutter was the choice for building out the mobile applications as a single code base can deliver binaries for both Android and ios. We experimented with flutter for the web but evidently stuck with React. React serves the invitation systems for those users who are invited to an event but are not mobile app users yet. It also provides the UI for business administration processes such as advertising.

Firebase is being used to drive the applications. It real-time database providing web sockets to the apps resulting in near-instant database transactions. It provides cloud functions, authentication, storage and deployments. It anchors Availabled. Firebase has a great use case for in-app notifications, it allows cross-platform events to trigger a notification to any of the applications.

The outcome

Since the initial launch of the product, Experience Digital have engaged contacts to partake in beta testing and to provide various levels of feedback. Availabled is yet to undergo a full go-to-market launch and ongoing marketing strategies but continues to grow organic platform users month on month. Users have started to use the platform as planned for social events as well as business and public events.

To date, the application has been downloaded more than 1000 times with zero marketing engagement efforts (due to beta testing) and catered for almost 5000 created events. A fundraising round to capitalise on this initial engagement is expected in July 2022. During this beta HyperCare period, approximately 25 user feedback responses have been submitted and addressed which has in turn seen an increase in the speed of the platform by approximately 50%.

Experience Digital has been engaged for future maintenance and upgrade projects to the platform due to its extremely valuable experience with the Flutter ecosystem. Our partnership with Experience Digital accelerates our vision, expertise and application as it holds a plethora of expertise within its technical team with a subject matter specialist for enhancements in message functionality, web/mobile interfaces and advanced architecture knowledge.