Building a user centric mobile app with React Native, to help Centrica customers manage loan payments through their pay-as-you-go meters.
The Innovation department at Centrica are continuously looking for new ways to improve the user experience for their seven million customers. As part of one of their experiments we were tasked with building an MVP mobile app that existing Centrica users could use to contract and manage micro-loans through their pay-as-you-go smart meter.
Speed to market was the key to success of this project. The MVP needed to be rapidly built, tested and launched so the innovation team could validate their hypotheses.
As the app needed to be built quickly and launched on both Android and iOS our team opted to use a cross platform solution using React Native with a backend API built using the Laravel framework. Working with their in-house design team we built an MVP app and a user-facing WordPress site. The first iteration was delivered in two sprints showing the various dashboards and the full app, connected to the Centrica payment systems and energy management API and ready for customer use, was delivered in 12 weeks.
The app was launched and tested with a closed group of users. Ultimately the idea itself did not validate their hypotheses however valuable insight was gained into user behaviour and further products are being developed based on this knowledge.
¨On all the projects we worked together it always felt like a collaborative effort, Secret Source took time to understand my objectives and requirements then applied both their broad technical expertise & progressive thinking to the project to deliver my desired outcome.”
“As with all things innovative you’re always looking for people that can deliver with agility & pace but who are flexible enough to work within budget constraints and Secret Source are always great on both fronts.¨
Secret Source continue to work with the innovation department at Centrica developing smoke tests and MVPs providing full teams for 3-12 months to build and iterate new products. Future projects have included a web application that allows users to manage building repairs based on feedback from their house survey and a system to manage home carers.