CoMotion

The challenge

Like most human activities, traveling is better if you do it together with family and friends. CoMotion is a great travel planning for group travelers.

CoMotion needed a re-design and also wanted to bring some key new features for their users. The work on the CoMotion iOS app started with a different team. The code was pretty much of a mess when we started the work on the app.

The solution

Our friends at Subsign did a great new UI & UX design for CoMotion. We helped with our expertise in the iOS platforms and maximized its potential on iOS. The general user experience (UX), over the months we worked together. Also, because the code was so bad, inevitably, we needed to re-write parts of the code. You’ll find more info about our approach below.

We helped CoMotion with adding transit information between trips and trip events to enrich its user’s experience and possibilities, added new news feed items. Overall, we improved the app performance, responsiveness and code quality.

The new UX & UI

We got excited about the new interface CoMotion users were going to see. We made sure that iOS app will look and work beautifully.

We started by redoing most of the old UI CoMotion had. We made sure we implement the best practices to make the UI will work well on all iPhone screen sizes. We also had the pleaseure to work on some great new UI elements: the bottom tab bar, the bubbling menu, the calendar date picker, the trip events timeline with the beautiful gradient transition.

It looks and works great now.

Don’t take it from us

Hear it from our friends and teammates from Subsign. They envisioned and created this beautiful interface.

New features

Foursquare integration

We helped by adding a Foursquare location picker when setting your trip, event or transit information locations.

Add transit information between trip events

We added a simple and very useful feature that help users specify information about their transits between events. They can be used to record transportation specific information and share it with friends. This will also help generate more interaction in the real world, as some friends might choose to travel together from a location to another.

What have we learned

1. It’s better and cheaper to take more time and implement a good architecture from the beginning,
   than it is to write the app faster, with average architecture, which later you will have to refactor.
2. It always helps to have the UI & UX design, or at least 90% of it ready, before starting to develop a feature.
3. Relying on third parties is good in some cases, but when possible and it takes the same amount of time, write your own code.

Improving code & architecture

Because we needed to add more features, change the UI, re-use some of that UI and because the existing code was not written very responsibly, we needed to make a lot of improvements. We are Clean Architecture advocates so we applied those principles to make the app more extendable and make the information flow better. We have re-written the forms to add trips, events and then re-used a lot of that code to add transit information.

What have we learned

1. We need to refactor something we know it’s not well written as soon as possible.
2. No need to re-write the entire app or re-write an the entire feature right away. It’s good to rewrite something strategically, gradually.
3. A lot of “how not-to-do” lessons from the old code the app had and confirmation that our coding practices are good when we got better results overall.