Background
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As a partner of Meet Hydrogen initiatives and events, we helped them make a splash at the Meet Hydrogen Roadshow this year by launching an interactive app in less than three months, with the potential for ongoing marketing impact and educational applications. The Roadshow is a traveling hub that visits cities across Greater Poland, giving locals, students, and business leaders a chance to learn about the hydrogen economy and its impact on industries, energy storage, and usage. Visitors run experiments fueled by hydrogen, conduct interactive experiments, and explore the importance of green energy. The Roadshow also features partner stands, lectures, meetings with industry experts, and a dedicated science zone for the youngest visitors.
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Objectives
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- Creating the Meet Hydrogen App: Design a digital experience that complements and enhances visitor exploration at the Roadshow, with native iOS and Android apps.
- Additional Services: Develop games, quizzes, and educational and marketing content to create lasting impact and relationships with app users.
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Challenges
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- Enabling users to find, identify, and scan relevant QR codes in a busy, potentially crowded physical environment while using the app.
- Crafting a high-quality user experience with interactive features, and launching the app in a short timeframe.
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Experience design
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Our team had prior experience working with Meet Hydrogen and understood their mission and objectives. We recognized that developing an app would serve as both an educational tool and a marketing asset for the organization and its industry partners. To create an MVP prototype, we analyzed feedback and materials from the previous year's Roadshow and designed a simplified version with interactive quizzes and an about section leading to additional content that could generate website leads. We ran small design sprints to keep the UI efficient and to facilitate smooth communication with developers for timely feature releases, gradually releasing features such as the selfie-frame, educational quizzes, and flashcards.
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Interactive and educational features
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The main screen lets users engage more deeply with the Roadshow exhibits and displays. QR codes on the main stations of the event, once scanned, guide users to play the quiz on their own device. The About section reinforces the app's mission, and fun features, selfie frame, quiz, flashcards, keep the app relevant and enable ongoing communication and engagement with users even after the event concludes.
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Mobile app development
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Both apps were built natively: Kotlin and Jetpack Compose for Android, Swift with Swift UI on iOS, creating a simple app with the newest UI toolkits: fast, satisfying, and easily expandable with additional screens and navigation. We used Firebase extensively as the backend for managing app content and generating app links via QR codes. These codes redirect users to the app store or open the app at a specific location, and Firebase also sends push notifications when we launched new features. We chose Firebase for its significant flexibility in delivering the app's content and release timeline without waiting for complete backend work, leveraging the flexibility of a NoSQL database.
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