Going-There website launch

Published 09 October 2014 under website, software, news

Today sees Going-There re-launch their corporate website and city guide application which has been developed by Afterthought Software.

Going-There have destination consultants (DCs) across the globe who help people move to a new city. Each DC has a tailored itinerary for each individual to help their assignee settle into their new surroundings. As well as a DC, Going-There now provide their city guide application (GT2go) to assignees which gives the user up-to-date information about everything they need to know about their city.

Within a few days we developed a prototype and quickly set it up on a staging server. This allowed for real users to start experiencing and interacting with the design and how it’s used on a variety of devices. The company's contact was based in London but we were able to have face-to-face meetings which quickly highlighted any issues or concerns. The design could then be fixed easily without having spent lots of time polishing the wrong thing.

Ruby on Rails was used from the outset for this project giving us fast bespoke development which is supported by automated tests. Many companies will charge extra to spend time doing manual testing of the site but using RSpec and Capybara we can automate integration tests. This means that we spend minutes rather than hours or even days testing the site and get better results.

Following a few small, quick iterations to make changes to the design the layout becomes less liable to change and we start of the second stage of development: making the site robust and polished. Ensuring everything looks and works well on different platforms and different devices is vital for good and consitent user experience. We also added a few nicer CSS interactions to improve the immediate impact of the site.

Because of the nature of relocation consultants, Going-There staff and users are often not on their laptops but on mobile devices on mobile networks. Therefore, it's important that the site is efficient in terms of the amount of data it sends. By keeping this in mind throughout the project we have been able to provide a solid and maintable codebase that works really well even on low-bandwidth connections.