Go Archives | *instinctools

Configuration Editor For a German Smart Home Appliances App

How honing the user experience of a digitally assisted cooking web app helped a client reduce employee manual work by 18% and ramp up the number of new users by 23% in just two months after the updated version rollout.

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Challenge

It’s amazing how things which once seemed impossible or fairy-tale, can be put into practice thanks to unique technological solutions.

Slavic folklore has a mythical image of a magical tablecloth which provides a number of delicious dishes with no effort on your part. Too good to become true? Our customer didn’t think so and made an induction hob system which is quite magical and definitely stands out among other ones. The three-piece system (a cooktop, a gourmet sensor and an app) automatically reads the properties of your food, optimally sets heat and cooking time, and notifies you whenever you need to add ingredients. The abovementioned interactive application smoothly guides you through the whole process of cooking.

Within this application, there’s a configuration file that includes all the recipes, pictures/videos, settings, etc. In other words, it contains the answers to the questions like what to show on the screen and at what stage, when to switch to the next step, is it possible to replace some ingredients with alternative options, and many others. The problem, though, was that all the modifications and adjustments to this file used to be made manually. That might be a dealbreaker for the overall project, as it caused quite a lot of troubles from wasting time on something that could be done more efficiently to involving too many people into the process which resulted in confusions and misunderstandings. Thus, the customer wanted this file to take the shape of a decent, manageable user interface: crystal clear to any user.

Tasks

editing a big volume of data in a single form
consolidating all the data and shaping it into a concise UI
developing the possibility to set different languages

Solution

Within the project, *instinctools team has developed a unique configuration editor for smart home appliances which allows to adjust all the necessary settings in a user-friendly way.

The customer gave us a complete freedom in choosing the instruments for the development. The only criterion of effectiveness was the result. Such an approach definitely helped the team to unlock their potential and make the product which by far exceeded the customer’s expectations.

Key Features

easy-to-use, human-centered UI
internationalism
multilingualism

Value

Our customer has made a revolution in digital cooking. We helped it to expand.

By structuring the data and wrapping it into an understandable user interface, we significantly cut down on time and effort used to be spent while working with the configuration file.

Moreover, the implementation of multilingualism facilitated the process of bringing the customer’s product to the markets of different regions.

The ultimate goal of making the cutting-edge technology available to everyone was successfully achieved.

Technologies

Online Business Assistant For an Investment Holding

How rolling out an intuitive online assistant backed up with up-to-the-minute data brought an investment company a 37% growth of their customer pool and helped thousands of users unlock their business development capabilities.

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About the project

Genome Ventures came to *instinctools being in need of a project called Online Business Assistant — a business tool, which collects data about one city or region and performs different kind of information (for example economic or demographic situation) to the user according to their request. It is aimed to help future entrepreneurs to quickly orient in business environment and buyers potentials in any area.

Challenge

Main goal of the project was to create a user-friendly platform which would analyse input data on some sphere of interest (economic, social, commercial, demographic situation, etc.) and return a result giving user a clear understanding of situation in specific area.

Due to this, application’s work included the following processes:

Comprehensive database: the app collected data by specific criteria from open and close resources.

Building analytics in various profiles in terms of existing database.

Integrating user-friendly interface with rapid output of the information requested.

Solution

Our team successfully coped with all tasks set and did their best to meet customer’s expectations. As a result we’ve got an application which could analyse users’ requests and show information useful for future entrepreneurs and small-medium businesses, who want to create or improve their business possibilities.

Key features

The app gives a user a wide choice of needed parameters, which can be useful to analyse current business environment in some area.

Analyzed information is performed in simple and understandable for user way.

The database is constantly updated from open and close resources, so the app reveals only relevant information.

Technologies

Real-Time Bidding Platform For an Advertising Company

How redesigning the Demand-Side Platform and improving its real-time bidding component helped an advertising company gather valuable information on external user engagement and reach the latency level of less than 100 ms.

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About the Project

*instinctools company was involved in the Real Time Bidding project that uses the Personal Retargeting technique. It is about showing ads to users, who have visited an advertiser’s site, however, failed to perform the conversion action. Personal Retargeting brings them back and shows each user a specific scenario,
depending on their previous action: viewing an item, comparing an item to other modifications etc.

DSP (Demand Side Platform) makes each 1 click cheaper. While using Trading Desk, advertisers adjust bids according to the value of their target audience, as well as to the desired impressions and clicks volume. The platform compares the data with the information on traders and bids, buying impressions as cheap as
possible and selecting the best matching audience. The whole process takes a split second: while the page is still loading.

Challenges

Support existing system functionality with lack of documentation and original developers’ knowledge.
Provide high-availability system to process a large amount of requests coming from SSP and advertiser sites. Each request should be executed with the lowest latency possible (less than 100ms).
Refactor and redesign the existing system in Microsevices manner. It provides scalability opportunities to process a large amount of requests. It also gives additional capabilities to optimize the costs of production environment usage and support.
Implement means of monitoring to measure system performance and track errors in real-time.

Solutions

The existing platform has been maintained and augmented with the Demand Side Platform, a system that organizes auctions for advertisers, and a user data management system. The platform has been integrated with the largest SSP platforms, such as Facebook Exchange and Taboola, employing HTTP cookies to gather information on users.

We have done an analysis of existing components and put together technical manuals. Having revealed and eliminated the failure caused in the course of maintenance, we achieved stable system’s operation.

We also have:

redesigned the system;
managed infrastructure hosting, data storage and data sharing using Amazon Cloud services developed components in the up-to-date programming languages;
gathered a huge amount of data using SSP and DMP components;
integrated several database management systems;
gathered valuable information on external user engagement;
Implemented a user metric processing system carried out continuous integration processes;

Technologies

The system design was based on wellknown Amazon cloud technologies like Elastic Compute Cloud, Elastic Load Balancer, Simple Storage Cloud, Elastic MapReduce, DynamoDB, etc.

Aggregated reporting included processing of huge data amounts received from SSP and DMP components. It was implemented using Hadoop jobs executed in Amazon EMR. The results were aggregated in Amazon Redshift databases.

As a part of asynchronous operation processing, the several messaging platforms were used. NSQ provided distributed queues for high amount data processing. Sidekiq was used to implement business logic messages processing through the set of components written in Ruby.

Application metrics were processed using Graphite and were shown by Grafana.

Continuous integration processes were implemented based on Gitflow by using Github + Travis services.

For the needs of infrastructure hosting, data storage, data sharing the following services were used: Amazon EC2, Amazon ELB, Amazon S3.

The components were developed in modern programming languages. Go language capabilities gave an opportunity to implement performance critical items. Scripting functionality which included component integration, configuration and deployment were completely implemented with Ruby and related technologies.

Multiple database management systems were used based on the required functionality: DynamoDB and Aerospike used to collect huge amount of data related to outside user activity, Redis databases satisfied the needs of temporary data keeping, PostgreSQL and Amazon Redshift provided strong consistency storage and processing of data related business activity and reporting.

Rollbar service was used to track errors occurred in a production environment.

Key Features

The client has obtained a stable version of the platform together with the build products, as well as an option to solve integration issues quickly and at a low cost in the future.

The augmented platform benefits are:

Tracking the system in a real-time mode
Integrating with other systems within its own framework
Performing the expected functions fast and accurately

The client was pleased with our fulfillment of the requirements and the recommendations of advertising partners. We are currently continuing to maintain the stable operation of the platform.