Maplify: A Travel Industry Case Study

Client

Lucas Rix

Industry

Travel

Location

USA

Core Technologies

Swift Realm AWS Nginx

Maplify

An iOS App for Travel Storytelling

Maplify lets travelers from all over the world create their own stories and share their experiences at destinations. Travelers can enrich their stories with text, geotagged images, audio, and video recordings. At the same time, Maplify is a marketing platform where businesses can advertise their travel services.

Challenges

After a successful launch of his first product, Lucas Rix returned to us with new travel app ideas. Previously, we have helped Lucas develop a contest marketplace that connects travelers with local experts.

This time, Lucas wanted to create a mobile app where travelers could gather all standouts during their trips, share them with other adventure lovers, and find destinations through other people’s stories. His aim was to make each user a writer of their own narrative and help users develop strong communities.

Lucas also wanted Maplify to become an effective marketing tool that business could use to interact with their potential customers without blatant advertising.

We were responsible for:

Defining the app’s business logic
Building a stable and scalable infrastructure to manage frequent content uploads
Creating a fully functional mobile app

Storyboard Layout

This layout helps travelers easily navigate among content blocks, discover and follow the content posted by their favorite storytellers.

A global story map

With a worldwide search on a story map, travelers can look through stories from a specific location.

Creating a new story

Maplify lets travelers enrich their stories with diverse content ‒ audio, video, image, and text ‒ so that travelers can fully immerse their followers in their experiences.

Adding stories

Travelers can either create a new post or add more experiences to the existing stories.

Traveler profile

The profile data helps travelers learn more about storytellers. Each profile includes data about all posts made by the storyteller and showcases their best stories.

Notification dashboard

Maplify sends travelers alerts once the storytellers they follow have posted a new piece of content so they don’t miss any interesting story.

Solutions

The RubyGarage team conducted in-depth research to understand the core market and their key problems. The Lean Canvas helped us map the business model and define the unique value proposition.

We offered a storyboard layout that helps users better process information and encourages them to explore more content.

Then we created a high-fidelity prototype of the app to examine its usability and analyze user behavior.

Once we got positive feedback from end customers, we began developing the actual product.

We provided the following solutions:

Developed a full-fledged app from scratch that can store and process a huge amount of media data
Used Amazon RDS and Amazon S3 to provide scalable, reliable, and secure data storage
Selected Amazon CloudFront so that users have fast access to data at any time and from any location
Employed SDWebImage to let users easily upload images
Implemented photo and video recording features to help users enrich their stories
Developed an audio recording feature so that users can leave voice comments to their stories on the go
Integrated Google Maps to help users automatically detect their locations and easily discover places
Added geotagging to connect users with experiences at the same places and help businesses target specific audiences
Integrated Facebook for fast and easy login
Created a global map with all tagged destinations so that users can scroll through geographic areas with attached stories and get physical addresses of places
Applied powerful analytics tools to analyze app performance and gain useful insights into user behavior

Technology Stack

Swift
Alamofire
Realm
AWS
Nginx
RSpec
Ruby on Rails
PUMA
PostgreSQL
Redis
SDWebImage
Google Maps
Google Places
Facebook API
Fabric
Crashlytics
Mixpanel
more

Results

RubyGarage helped Lucas Rix create a digital storytelling app that satisfies the needs of both travellers and businesses. The app connects travelers worldwide, creates close-knit communities, and helps travelers find unique locations to explore. Meanwhile, it lets businesses effectively increase brand awareness and reach their prospects in a meaningful way.

The design and development solutions provided by the RubyGarage team helped increase the conversion rate and improve our client’s return on investment.

Maplify

Lucas Rix

Founder of Maplify

Maplify was created to let users share their stories with others. I wanted to give avid travelers like me a chance to transport other people to locations they’ve experienced and to make them feel the same. The RubyGarage team helped me shape my idea into the essential functionality of my future app.

They have proven to be a reliable and flexible partner that is willing to go above and beyond to help. They dug hard into the project to understand particularities of my business and delivered all requirements quickly and professionally.

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