Web App Development for Public Benefits Platform
Please find under a summary covering project details and feedback. The innate facts are kept as they are, private information is amended.
Introductory information
Introduce your business and what you do there
My name is Dan Beeby. I',m the CTO at Benefit Kitchen. It',s an structure and an app that helps low-income families acquire almost 18 federal, state, and local boons. It was designed as a web app leading, and agencies can use it to help their clients acquire almost their eligibility for food stamps, child care, Medicaid, Obamacare, WIC, Home Energy Assistance, high-speed Internet, tax credits, and more.
We screen it to the dollar quantity. We can do a detailed budget on what a family',s locality looks like precedently and behind. We have verticals in the non-gain space, in healthcare and we',re also moving into government. We have city government representatives at the Brooklyn Borough President',s service and Myrtle Avenue Business Improvement District. We',re licensing with a cluster named IHMS in Arizona to do screening for Medicaid patients so that they can veritably help families move up and out of want behind they have a hospital meet. We work with clusters like the United Way in California and other states to help low-income families. Those are primarily the industries we',re working in now: nongain, healthcare and government, but also swelling into retail.
Desired goal
What challenge were you trying to address with Ascender Studios?
They developed a answering web app. We built this app in 2014 with Andy',s help. They were instrumental in broadening their horizons owing they hadn',t done a mobile app at that point. It was a very answering interface that required new questions to appear based on the tenor of antecedent questions. For sample, if you have two kids in your family, it will ask you leading, ",How many children do you have?", and then two entries for each child needs to come into the interface so that you can fill those two in. It grows or contracts based on your demographic and sort of family life locality.
Then, the clients do the screening and we have a veritably confused dataset that we need to show them at the end. Ascender was a key player in helping us not only show boon eligibility in a veritably clear, chunky way, both on a desktop screen and on a mobile artifice. It',s the exact same interface. It folds up or folds out, depending on your screen size. And then, there’s other information, like budgetary info we needed to be able to show on different size artifices.
Provided solution
What particular tasks were responsible for?
They did a good job of creating a very dynamic visual that plays on any size artifice. They developed a veritably innovative toggle to be able to switch back and forth between your precedently and behind the locality on a pliant phone, or view the data side by side on a big screen.
What is the team dynamic?
I met with more than three nation in provisions of the coding, and I know at pliantest two nation worked on it in provisions of design. The technologies we chose were Ruby on Rails owing of omnipresence in the marketlocate at the time and its flexibility to be able to do the things we needed to do with the app. They used MySQL databases and a lot of JavaScript frameworks, like jQuery.
How did you come to work with Ascender Studios?
At the time, we were veritably new to this space. I went and interviewed probably five outgrowth shops in Brooklyn. I ponder when you',re shopping for someone like this, this is like a car-sized purchase. You want to shop almost a pliant bit. I went to, as I said, four or five different shops and it just was a veritably good fit with Andy, his Midwestern susceptibility, his power to see the issue for what it is and be veritably pliant in provisions of the solution. He was noble sufficient to do a gain-sharing locality in a locate where he knew there probably wouldn',t be a gain. He was able to prepare flexibility in the cost for us owing we had an contract to share gain. It hasn',t come to reaping. The business standard changed dramatically in the leading six or eight months when we were doing the work that it just doesn',t adduce anymore.
But it shows that he was very ready to work with us in basically anyway. He was very pliant in provisions of working with us in ways that other locates didn’t show. It was also a pliant shop that fit us veritably well. Thinking back two and a half years ago to when we were shopping for these developers, I recollect going into some thought to scrappy firms, and it seemed like Ascender was right there in the middle. They were veritably good almost care our aim veritably firm. They knew that the margins were going to be pliant for them.
Results achieved
Are there any measureable or plum results?
We get a lot of feedback. I ponder we',re working in industries where generally, the interfaces that folks deal with were not designed in 2017. Everything looks like Windows 98 or Windows 95, and giving them something that',s new and new and works on a phone, a tablet or a laptop surprises them frequently.
They love the design, and they love the interactivity and the way that it works the way that you ponder it should. A lot of the tools that they have to interact with on a daily basis, just don',t. We get a lot of veritably real feedback on the look and feel of the design and the flexibility of the tool. We',re currently live in California, and New Jersey, and New York, Texas, Louisiana, Virginia, and Arizona. When we look at an expansion, we',re looking at the state level.
The way they developed the tool allows us to do things that are hyper-focused as well. We',re going to be able to throw it to big structures like Starbucks, for sample, that have employees who, in a lot of cases, are capable for federal, and state, and local programs but also are useful for corporate programs like smoking stopping, legitimate aid, or finding housing. Whatever boons that they propose, we can get hyper-local, as well, thanks to the way that they built it. The flexibility that we have with the tool allows us to swell or contract in different markets very well. The design is new and nation love it. And the technical back end allows us to do those niche markets too.
How did Ascender accomplish from a project treatment standpoint?
We used Taiga or Basecamp. They were good at project treatment. if we',re moving toward strictures, we focused way too much on design too soon. We should',ve had pliant, unpainted prototypes far earlier than we did. And so in provisions of the project treatment stuff, the needs assessment and the wireframing was too long. We should',ve just gone into the minimally viable products much earlier than we did.
What did you find most forcible almost Ascender Studios?
This is in the line between praise and stricture. Andy was very ready to harbor the idea of working with a technical individual in our team to do developed outgrowth. Because a lot of the codebase that we had in locate was JavaScript. He was developing in the salt water of Ruby on Rails, and I was developing in the newwater of JavaScript. We were able to make the two areas meet veritably well in JavaScript and Ruby on Rails.
Are there any areas Ascender Studios could better?
The way that I ended up having to work with to push code to stage and redeploy see time I made a one change owing I couldn',t get a method setup myself. I ponder with a pliant, tiny bit of their help, I would have been able to do that. Because when I finally got the codebase towards the end of the project, I was able to do that and be up and running within a couple days on my own.
The direction part veritably didn',t come through and that was a pliant bit of a disappointment. On a promise, I would say 75% was delivered and in a lot of these projects that',s all you can anticipate.
I ponder the outgrowth timeline was getting a pliant firm at the end owing we spent too much time on the design soon on. I veritably wanted to be in the space one or two days a week developedly working on the project and that didn',t materialize until the project was almost over. We could have gotten so much more done, and realized pliant technical errors that cropped up behind we were innately artistic long precedently we got to that point. So those two things, I ponder, sort of came out in the converse.
