Transforming travel experience through self-guided tours.
Travel marketplace platform / 6+ month engagement / 4-person team
About the project
Illustrail is a map-based travel marketplace platform. It offers self-guided tours for travelers, culture vultures, foodies and those who want to rediscover familiar places through engaging and interactive city quests. Users can also create their own custom quests or tours, both private or public and monetize them.
Product features
Data moderation
To prevent the creation of restricted content, the platform allows admins to monitor created content and mark it appropriately.
Notifications
Users receive notifications when they reach certain locations or when they open a new hint.
Caching
As the application contains lots of media data it is very important to manage it wisely so that it doesn’t use all of the available hardware resources. App uses custom logic for caching data effectively.
Quests features
Each user can search for quests created by others or create his own one. Each quest is highly customisable.
Users can create an unlimited number of branches for their quest, add steps, create loops and customize the visualization of their branch.
Services
UI / UX Design
Product Management
Software Engineering
Quality Assurance
Technologies
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Client side: Flutter, BLoC
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Testing: Fastlane, Testflight
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Cloud: GCP
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3rd party: Google maps API, Algolia
Product Team
1 full-time flutter engineer
1 designer (hourly)
1 delivery partner (hourly)
1 QA engineer
The process
Design concept
At this stage our UI/UX designer turned the product idea into wireframes, based on which a modern design for the app was created.
Release to the stores
Inception and prototyping
The client came to us with an idea of building a travel marketplace. We started with analyzing potential users, project objectives, solution feasibility, and defined the key features and requirements. After agreeing on priorities we got down to wireframing and created a product roadmap.
Development
Flutter engineer started coding the app according to design documents and outlined project requirements. The team worked in short sprints with weekly DEMOs with the client, where we showed the development progress and defined major features of the project. A QA engineer joined the team after the first deployment, testing the app for bugs and issues.
The fully functional app was released to Google play market and App store within 6 months of development. After the deployment, we continue to maintain the application and improve it with more functionality.
They were very professional and detail-oriented. Working on the product they covered aspects I haven’t even thought about. You can give them the task and be sure that it will be delivered in the best possible manner. They exceeded my expectations most substantially with showing ownership of the project; it felt very much like working with a great team, not just someone contracted to do a job.
Co-Founder, Cambridge Technical
The solution architecture
