What’s the story behind the Engagedly mobile app? How did it start?
I think the mobile app was in existence even before I joined the organization back in 2017. The first version of the app was developed using the Ionic framework which uses an Angular-based hybrid app development approach. The initial version of the app comprised basic actions such as social posts, feedback, and directory. Soon, more features such as goals and private notes were added to the web application which needed to be added to the mobile app as well.

This went on until 2019 when the web application started a whole new journey with the revamp project coming into the picture. There were new designs introduced with a whole new theme to enhance the user experience. With this change, it was also necessary for the mobile app to match up with the web application revamp. Ionic framework as such would not provide much customization on the UI side as the component look and feel was quite restrictive to standards. Thus we switched to React Native after some consultation from an external team to whom the revamp project for the mobile app was outsourced. Thus the new version of the app i.e Engagedly 2.0 came into existence. We released this version in 2020 with all the current features intact except for changes in UI/UX. We also introduced new features to be consistent with the web one like the pending actions. Maintaining an outsourced application in-house became hard and so, we formed an in-house team who would maintain and add new features to the app.

What was the hardest challenge you had to face while building the app?
I am not sure as to what challenges the team had to face while building the first version of the app but when it comes to Engagedly 2.0 the challenge was to work with the outsourced team which sits in Argentina and pass on the information regarding the functionality and the technical details such as API information was quite tricky as we did not have proper API documentation and I also had to simultaneously work on the web application. We did not have an in-house at this point. So communication was the hardest challenge.

What’s the current trend in mobile technology?
A few to mention here,

• Support for foldable devices – this is something which is something similar to landscape and portrait mode.
• Augmented Reality – features such as face filters (Instagram, Snapchat), Live View which is used by Google Maps
• Predictive Analytics – anticipating the user experience and predicting the user expectations based on the current set of data.
• Chatbots – AI-driven chatbots where the responses are more human-like. This significantly improves customer service interactions.

Where do you see the Engagedly mobile app evolving in the next 2-3 years?
We would love to see a better user experience that is functionally rich and provides a way of data analytics that will help the users and the internal team thrive to make better decisions.