Merixstudio

Norma Precision’s mission is to allow marksmen to become even better at their outdoor craft. The client approached us with a specified vision for a premium web and mobile application characterized by usability, reliability, and intuitiveness. The end product users’ awaited a brand new mobile and desktop app that would replace a previous mature solution no longer accommodating the client’s current needs. The discovery phase revealed the users’ needs and functional expectations.

PROBLEM TO SOLVE

The scope of work, executed by Merixstudio’s dedicated product team with full project ownership, included:

• Developing a new UI and UX design
• Implementing mathematical calculations in Dart based on the C language solutions delivered
• Leveraging JavaScript interoperability to launch the calculations on a desktop app
• Performing indispensable automatic tests to validate the accuracy of the algorithmic setup
• Executing relevant calculations to obtain the metric system result
• Developing a usable mobile and web app based on a mathematical engine for calculations
• Functional enhancements 
• App maintenance

PROCESS & SOLUTION

To effectively transpose the requirements into a usable product, we followed an Agile methodology with 2-week sprints. The 10-people project team covered all the bases starting from the MVP stage and further execution phase to maintenance, with an open prospect for continued collaboration.

The core of the proposed solution involved using Flutter, a modern high-performing cross-platform toolkit coming with Google’s stable support, a reusable code base, and fast time-to-market perspectives. This choice included a critical analysis of the toolkit’s capability for seamless external Bluetooth communications and the possibility of complex chart rendering. It allowed the project to fit high usability, incl. custom widgets, into a tight deadline that was of specific importance for the client and their users. 

Flutter served as a technological basis for the functionally indispensable mathematical engine and precise calculator in the mobile version. It also enabled a flexible UI design, library accessibility, and cross-platform usability for Android and iOS. Flutter was complemented by other mobile setup elements. Firebase boosted development by enabling easy app development and releases, while Bitrise.io facilitated automated code management. Localizely provided added value for the mobile app’s supplementary multi-language user interface.

Our software experts also ensured that the final product reflected the client’s requirements. A deep dive into specific Domain Knowledge of the client’s outdoor activity niche allowed us to craft a highly usable and precise app based on complex mathematical algorithms created from scratch. These algorithms enabled users to have the projectile trajectory thoroughly calculated so that they could focus on perfecting their craft. To that end, we employed unit and manual testing which bulletproofed the application to work in a local environment.

For the desktop version, the Merixstudio team used ReactJS that, together with Redux and Webpack, provided a usable setup for the Iframe-based web app. The Flutter team also converted the Dart-based code into a desktop-capable version that powered the frontend of the web app. We also implemented REST API, HTML5, and CSS, while our Flutter experts’ calculations' code conversion supported the revamped version of the existing web app. 

The project team’s flexible approach during Sprint 0 enabled a fast adoption of the most apt backend solutions. Merixstudio executed an AWS Lambda platform enablement to cater to the client’s serverless needs.Thanks to this solution, the integration with AirTable was possible because the product data derived from AWS was easily accessible to the mobile or desktop app.
 

Our custom-made mathematical engine processes calculations to display both metric and imperial units measurements. The tricky part about this process is to avoid conversion-related inaccuracies which, in this precision business, constitute the very risk of mounting estimation discrepancies.  As a result of our software experts’ customized approach to this challenge, the app beats the relevant competition in a field-test “accuracy contest” related to the imperial-to-metric-units conversion.

ALL DETAILS OF THE PROJECT: https://www.merixstudio.com/work/norma-precision/