SYSTEMS INTEGRATION, SELF-SERVICEMAGVAULT CASE STUDY

PUBLIC AND ADMIN PORTAL TO SEARCH OVER10,000 MOBILE & TABLET MAGAZINE APPS 

Magvault is an online portal created to help people with tablets and smartphones find digital magazine apps

WHO IS MAGVAULT

There was no immediatelyavailable way for

Magvault’s search engine to simultaneously access

all relevant app stores and locate products.

MAGVAULT’S CHALLENGE AND OUR SOLUTION

We created an admin portal that included a

custom-built web-bot to index Apple Store and

GooglePlay pages. To further enhance searching accuracy we

added geolocation filtering to the website’s product search engine.

WHAT WE DELIVERED

A responsive website and an admin portal

Our biggest challenge with the website’s user experience was getting the user to the desired product easily, across all devices. First, we gave the search box the prime spot on all pages regardless of the size of the screen. Second, for users prefering to browse their way to products, we created an extensive menu combining two levels of navigation. Testing a prototype on small screens proved the size of menu to be overwelming so we replaced it with an index of all product categories on the homepage.

» Information Architecture » Interactive prototyping » Interface design » Testing

HOW WE DID IT - THE USER EXPERIENCE ANGLE

SKILLS USED

The bespoke admin portal is built using our standard DevExpress template which facilitates rapid construction of stable, multi-browser compatible systems. The database is built using Microsoft SQL Server and cloud-hosted Excel spreadsheets are used for the ongoing management of publication information.

We created a custom web crawler to visit each of the links and automatically retrieve icons, magazine covers, preview pages, description content and ratings on a scheduled basis. This data is used for presentation on the website but it is also stored in a SQL Server full-text index to power the website’s built in search results.

The responsive, SEO-optmised website is a custom Microsoft ASP.NET build and it uses browser location detection features to tailor the home, category and app store listings by automatically filtering on country of magazine origin.

» Bootstrap » .NET framework » DevExpress » Microsoft SQL Server

HOW WE DID IT - THE TECHNOLOGY ANGLE

TECHNOLOGIES USED

THE OUTCOME

12,400 < 1 sec

We created a unique website that allows the user to search across all major app stores to find a magazine title.

app links on the website,for 6,400 titles, across 3,000

publishers, in 8 app stores, in 4 countries

needed for the website to return a query