Time Out
Launches new universal iPhone app.
Time Out, the most trusted source of information and inspiration to enable people to make the most of their city, has launched a new iPhone app developed by a joint Time Out and ThoughtWorks team. The app is replacing existing individual city guide apps by serving location-based information through a single, universal client. The editorial recommendations that make Time Out famous are given greater prominence with lists, features and curated selections on the app homepage. Tools for instant inspiration, searching, bookmarking and easy booking give the user everything they need to plan for now or later.
With one app representing all of Time Out globally in the App Store, customers can find the content they want more easily, while marketing and advertising campaigns now gain global scale and put all of Time Out’s publishing might behind a new digital platform. New releases for additional cities will be faster, higher quality and lower cost than separate apps.
Client mission and challenge Time Out began as a free weekly listing of current events and nightlife in London in 1968. Since then “the world’s living guide” has grown to cover the globe from Abu Dhabi to Venice in a variety of formats and the Time Out brand is a global icon. But the rapid shift of the industry from print to digital along with the trend of younger people who are among Time Out’s most avid fans to use their mobile phones and tablets to access content, presented a major challenge to the publisher. Time Out was already digital with city and travel guides online on the web, and with mobile apps for many cities around the world. But those apps were a first generation for the publisher.
Since the release of their first iPhone app in 2009, Time Out has made great strides as a digital publisher, both editorially and in terms of revenue opportunities. They now need mobile products to match the vision of the company and this new iPhone app sets the benchmark. It provides the smart, location-savvy tools the modern mobile user expects and the revenue opportunities the business demands. As well as flexible advertising units the new app includes restaurant and ticket booking, special offers and a digital Time Out Card for cardholders. The beautiful design ensures the whole package brings Time Out well and truly up to date on mobile.
Global Platform to Serve all Cities “With the strategic importance of mobile for Time Out, which is known as the source for the best and latest of everything citywide – we had to have an approach that would let us continue to delight our customers. Yet we also had to begin creating a
new digital platform we could rely on for many decades, one that supports all channels and would better allow us to scale our global marketing,” says Sophie Lewis, Mobile Product Manager. “We’re now creating what we call the Global Platform,” says Dave Cook, CTO. “It’s a single system to manage the Time Out content for all cities. And city-by-city we are migrating people to that content. So we can actually have one app for Time Out around the world.” Cook said of the project, “It had many dependencies. At the same time as we were building the new iPhone app, we were also creating the APIs to serve our content to mobile. We also had a number of integrations within the app with partners for booking and buying” Time Out selected ThoughtWorks as development partner for the new universal iPhone app because as Cook says “ThoughtWorks’ rigorous use of agile brought our teams together. Their approach has become the de facto standard for us of how to lay a project down, how to track progress, and how to prioritise. That has been a benefit to the rest of the organization.”
www.thoughtworks.com
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Now we have one Time Out iPhone app that will let us bring all our cities to customers much faster, it’s a cornerstone for our future digital platform, and something we can put a global campaign behind.
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Sophie Lewis, Mobile Product Manager.
TestFlight To give stakeholders real evidence for decisions on features and the user experience, the team used a service called TestFlight, which allowed Time Out to engage hundreds of beta testers during much of the development for the new app. “People think that continuous delivery when you’re building iPhone or iOS apps is hard or impossible because you have to release it to the App Store for approval before it goes live, which is the case in terms of getting it out to its users,” says David Tuck, ThoughtWorks Client Principal. “We were doing continuous delivery during development using TestFlight, allowing user experiences to be monitored, measured and fed back into design.” Every week a new app was released (after fully automated testing) using TestFlight to a subscribed beta team of well over a hundred users in various locations. “Evidence from the testing helped us gain agreement among the many stakeholders, who often had strong, diverse opinions about what the new app should be like. Access to test results from a set of independent users helped stakeholders reach optimal decisions.” It was also through the TestFlight group that several of the coolest features of the new app came about. “As we tested with the beta group we found out more about how customers wanted to use the app,” says Darius Kumana, ThoughtWorks Principal Consultant. “We combined several features that were at first separate into a single power feature, which we also made very easy to use, and very slick, so users could do searching as well as get the what/when/where and ‘best nearby’ as one thing. Customers can explore without getting lost, and complete their journey without ever having to retrace steps.”
Time Out in Customers’ Pockets “Our customers are now getting Time Out content delivered right to their pocket,” say Cook. “When you search for content you get results based on Time Out recommendations and other criteria. We’ve got some secret sauce in there. That’s from a search point of view, but we also have our curated content of the best things to do, the best restaurants, best burger bars, best cocktail bars. Those sorts of lists are included in the app. And they will be available in all the cities that end up being in the global platform.” What was it like to work with ThoughtWorks? Says Cook, “ThoughtWorks engineers don’t just take orders, they seek understanding, and that requires communication. ThoughtWorks’ are more vocal than many developers. That’s been a really good insight and cultural change for us. They were committed to the whole endeavor - always trying to do the best they could in order to help achieve our overall goals.”
Big Rewards for Ambitious Vision A single app replaces individual city guides. New cities are easier, faster and less costly to roll out. Iterative improvements to the app benefit global users instantly. App quality and consistency are higher, and ongoing maintenance costs lower. With one app representing all of Time Out globally in the App Store, customers can find the guide they want more easily, while marketing and advertising campaigns now gain global scale and put all of Time Out’s publishing might behind the new digital platform. TestFlight allowed user experiences to be monitored, measured and fed back into decision-making of stakeholders during development. Future App Store approval dependencies are minimised, because RESTFul architecture allows Time Out to change some features and switch things on and off without going through a new approval process.
www.thoughtworks.com
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