Our client is a team of professionals providing secure and seamless access to legal proceeding records for jurisdictions and litigants. This SaaS-based workflow management application is designed for court jurisdictions and private firms, providing tools for reporting and transcription teams to efficiently manage and track the progress of all transcripts, including appeals.
The platform had a prototype built by us in just 7 weeks using the Rapid Prototyping approach in order to minimize the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop.
Key Highlights:
- Outsourced product development: Using the Rapid Prototyping approach, we built a prototype of the product within 7 weeks
- The prototype received good feedback and investor funding
- The Beta site went live in 3 months, and the full release after 2 months of Beta testing
- New revenue streams have opened up for the product, and a pivot is in process
About the project
The Goals
- While facing severe challenges with the performance of their Drupal applications, the team contacted us to help in resolving the issues
- The relationship that started in 2013 grew into a long-term relationship in which we play the role of a business and tech thought partner
- The client's primary aim was to increase user engagement
The Solution
We spent some time understanding the requirements remotely and shared wireframes and photographs of whiteboard discussions. Discovery workshops were conducted remotely. A click-through prototype was developed using HTML, CSS, and Angular. This prototype took about 7 weeks to build with a lean team of one person, and was ready by July 2014.
The client took this prototype to potential users and VCs. The users included some enterprises considered big players in the transcription market. The product was also shown to mid-sized players, as well as single-person shops. The users found it of great value. Investors also gave approval, and Their team received funding for the product.
According to user feedback, users realized the prototype was ahead of its time in terms of existing market requirements. The target audience was people working from home or part-time—homemakers, and most users were not IT savvy. Hence, the product needed to be simple to use, with few adoption hurdles. Thus, a number of the envisioned product features were dropped, and a much leaner and minimal product was focused on.
With only a prototype developed using our Rapid Prototyping approach, the product idea was validated, and our client's team decided to proceed with developing the platform.
Why Drupal was chosen
- We explored various technologies such as Drupal, Apache, Ruby on Rails, hosting services, and so on and all the data about the technologies and services was compiled. It then came up with an architecture for our client for the present as well as for future as the product evolved.
- While exploring the technology options, we always had the decision of choosing speed over perfection. Hence, Drupal was chosen for its out-of-the-box features and we built all custom code by writing custom PHP libraries, keeping in mind its future scalability.
- Drupal was well suited for the project’s requirements because of its large community support, flexibility of integration with other systems and regular security updates.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
- Ajax Blocks: It permits to load some blocks by additional AJAX request after loading the whole cached page when the page is viewed by an anonymous user. It is suitable for sites which are mostly static, and the page caching for anonymous users is a great benefit, but there are some pieces of information that have to be dynamic.
- Entity Reference: Entity Reference is a fantastic module to build relationships between entities in Drupal.
- Field Collection: Allows a set of fields to be combined together and treated as a single field.
- HTML Mail: It lets you theme your messages the same way you theme the rest of your website.
- Message (and Message Notification): The Message module is the core of the message stack. It enables logging and displaying system events in a number of different use cases. Events that are recorded over time are sometimes call activity streams. Exportable messages sub-types can be created for different use cases with custom fields and display (view) modes.
- Elysia Cron: Elysia Cron extends Drupal standard cron, allowing a fine grain control over each task and several ways to add custom cron jobs to your site.
- Multistep Nodeform: For each step you can define which fields should be included in this step. "Fields" include core-fields like "Title", "Body" or "Authoring information" as well as fields defined by other modules (e.g. Date).
- S3 File System: S3 File System (s3fs) provides an additional file system to your drupal site, which stores files in Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) or any other S3-compatible storage service. You can set your site to use S3 File System as the default, or use it only for individual fields. This functionality is designed for sites which are load-balanced across multiple servers, as the mechanism used by Drupal's default file systems is not viable under such a configuration.
- MongoDB Module: This module provides a simple, elegant solution for using models stored in mongodb.
- File Field Source Plupload: It lets you add Plupload (a multiple files/multifile upload widget) as a source to any file field supporting FileField Sources. Plupload is a GPL licensed multiple file uploading tool that can present widgets in Flash, HTML5, Silverlight, and HTML4 depending on the capabilities of the client computer. By using it to add Plupload as a source, multiple file uploads can be achieved on regular File and Image fields using the standard widgets as well as a range of contributed field widgets supporting FileField Sources.
- Plupload Integration Module: Provides integration between for the Plupload widget to upload multiple files and Drupal. Plupload is a GPL licensed multiple file uploading tool that can present widgets in Flash, Gears, HTML5, Silverlight, BrowserPlus, and HTML4 depending on the capabilities of the client computer.
The Business Benefits
- Customer engagement significantly increased with customers being happy with a better browsing experience
- The team was flexible enough to accommodate new requests whenever they came in
- The site allowed the team to manage its existing architecture, and helped them scale up as the business grows
- With Rapid Prototyping, Our client was able to test the product’s market viability and user interest. The team was also able to obtain the funding needed for the product development
- The team was able to discuss and envision the product features with us through remote discussions. Not having developers in close geographic proximity never presented a problem
