Background
For over a decade, Magnetize has built feature-rich business management software and applications using a host of offshore developers based overseas. Users found the desktop app overwhelming, overly complicated and cumbersome, and the mobile application unusable.
Upon gathering recommendations from local vendors on the top software development partners in New Zealand, Magnetize was referred to Company-X as their next strategic technology partner.
Challenge
Working with offshore organisations with disparate cultural values, behaviours, and languages is often a challenge for the most seasoned development and project managers in the industry. In addition to time zones, differences in styles of communication and language proficiencies, interpretations of requirements and priorities, and standards associated with coding, quality control, and testing can lead to a challenging dynamic and gaps between expectation and delivery.
In building their business model, Magnetize had identified the problems associated with managing people, equipment, and jobs and made the decision to leverage offshore capabilities to resolve the issue. While the resulting software was functional and feature packed, the performance ratings associated with usability, aesthetic design, and adoption failed to capture the capture satisfaction ratings required to service their audience effectively.
Solution
Company-X’s UX and UI designer interviewed the Magnetize stakeholders and users to conduct open ended, honest interviews to understand the functional, psychological and behavioural attitudes and patterns that they exhibited within the application to gain an in-depth understanding of the software, journey, and user experience.
“I wanted to understand the problem the software would solve and the language users were familiar with”
– Briana Christey
Once complete, our software architect and senior developer examined the existing software and recommended a replacement approach as a cost-effective way of resolving the usability issues and modernising the technology.
As a result, Company-X led a full product development process resulting in the design and build of an entirely new, easy to use, version of Magnetize from the ground up.
Result
The Magnetize web and mobile app were reimagined, from the ground up, as a new Software as a Service (SaaS) solution to streamline systems for heavy equipment and machinery operators.
Company-X and Briana Christey designed and developed a job manager’s website and a complimentary mobile app to solve the specific pain points users raised by Magnetize users.
The integrated software solution handles job details and scheduling as well as quoting and invoicing via accounting software Xero. It allows for the creation and editing of associated files, such as Microsoft Word documents and PDF files.
The Magnetize web and mobile app are being successfully used by clients for scheduling and rescheduling people, equipment, and jobs across the civil and construction, transport, trades and services, manufacturing, and professional services industries.
About Magnetize
Magnetize enables any business that schedules people, equipment and jobs to operate on any device from anywhere. Magnetize clients transform their business as they ditch the paperwork digitise all their health and safety and other paper-based processes, whiteboards, and spreadsheets in favour of a simple to use, cloud-based start-to-end job management system that fully integrates with accounting software Xero.
The Christchurch earthquakes kicked Magnetize into gear when sister company Pro-Drill Specialist Drilling Engineers became involved in what would end up being the biggest geotechnical investigation in the world. The investigation involved 375,000m of Geotech coring and 4,600 pieces of paperwork.
There was nothing on the market that consolidated all of Pro-Drill’s software needs so they built their own solution.
Pro-Drill created software that allowed it to manage all its business, in real-time, on the go. The volume of work and constant rescheduling could not have been completed without the software with dozens of jobs per day and more than $56 million worth of invoices successfully billed.
The Magnetize app underwent years of invaluable refinement.
