Case Studies

Key Features

1. Versatility – The app includes various activities and allows the user to manage all aspects of party planning —bars and restaurants, travel, booking, payments, and so on.
2. Chat – People can be added to a party group chat and discuss party plans within the app.
3. Balance – There is a transparent calculation of all activities to know how much the party will cost in total or in parts. 
4. Scheduling – The app allows party members to create a schedule of bars and restaurants they plan to visit. 
5. Polls – Users can create open polls to vote on various matters — for example, which bar is worth visiting. 
6. Booking – The app allows party members to book flights and hotel rooms from within the app. 
7. Party shopping – Users can pay for their airline tickets and party supplies directly from the app. 
8. Recommendations – The app has a recommendation section and can provide information on what hotel might be better or what activities you can do in a particular area.

There is also the Admin Console web application that allows admins to monitor app operations.

Tech and Approach 

We favored cross-platform development for the following reasons:

1. The app does not have any OS-specific functions such as camera work, Bluetooth, complicated map scenarios, and more, so there was no benefit in using native programming languages.
2. Features are delivered much faster when using cross-platform development.
3. The cost of QA is much lower because the changes are made locally in one spot, and that reduces the probability of making a mistake in the code.

Scaling

The system is ready to be scaled at any time. The system is built in such a way that we do not have to make any changes in order for it to accommodate that many people. It was designed from the start to handle a large workload.

Challenges

Most of the challenges we faced in this project were related to date and time management. During party planning, several details about the timeframe of the event might become apparent that were not accounted for, so the system needed to be as flexible as possible.

Another challenge was to figure out the specifications of this functionality during the earlier stages of development, so we worked closely with our client to clarify how these scenarios should work. The technical implementation of the date and time management feature for different cases was also not an easy task, but we succeeded nonetheless.

Another challenge we ran into was the integration of Shopify, a platform for configuring online stores so our clients could set up a number of party activities that the users will have access to and manage the catalogue of those activities. It turned out that Shopify API was not as well-documented as we hoped it would be and offered fewer features than the Shopify interface itself. We also had to deal with request limits and build a balancer to manage the request queue.

The project is now live, and we keep updating it with new features every two to three weeks. We developed an all-encompassing platform for party planning that can help people organize events quickly and hassle-free while communicating with other participants and managing expenses—all in one place. This project has been an amazing experience for us so far, both from the development standpoint and from the idea behind the app.