Key Insight

The first step was a technical discovery process where we unpacked product vision, user experience, and requirements. This ranged from no-fuss sign-up, booking meeting rooms, reserving a table at a restaurant, invitations to shopping events, and digital wayfinding. We wanted to ensure the experience had a premium aesthetic, delivered the right functionality, and retained the flexibility to develop new functionality in the future. We developed a new technology stack and architecture utilising a headless CMS and off-the-shelf enterprise-grade APIs, which allows for the addition of more services in the future. We then worked collaboratively with Precinct, designing detailed wireframes for key user flows aligned to the proposed architecture. Prototypes for the core ordering and payment flows were created for user testing with staff, operations teams, and customers. After validating the various journeys, we completed the UI with an updated look and feel based on Commercial Bay's new brand guidelines.

Key Insights

Tenant success was critical to the project. We provided Precinct with smart marketing tools so the team could work on behalf of the 150 retail and commercial tenants. This included an app, website, digital signage, and mobile marketing toolkit—all powered by a user-friendly content management system. The admin-friendly dashboard provided their community managers and marketing teams with a full suite of configurable components, including user targeting, reporting, and analytics.

Key Insights

We enabled Precint to engage their audience using tools such as a wallet, redeemable offers, gift cards, gamified loyalty, and push notifications. Precint were able to run seasonal campaigns including "free coffee" by integrating the Commercial Bay App with the Point of Sale (POS) system at a local coffee bar and a daily chance to "spin the wheel" and win a prize, whereby successful users got a digital voucher that could be redeemed by scanning a QR Code at the operator's POS.

Key Insight

The pandemic hit mid-project, just weeks before the Precint was due to open its doors. A decision was made to accelerate the launch of mobile food ordering, a feature that was on the roadmap but was out of scope for launch. It now became critical to the success of the app as it would enable visitors to the Precinct to safely order food from vendors from the app. A Precinct dining guide was developed that seamlessly blended editorial content and promotions, with in-app functionality helping customers to order ahead, order table service, or have their order delivered to their office. We designed, built, and tested the system in six weeks of remote prototyping. All 50 operators signed up in time to "safely" serve over 300,000 visitors to the Precinct in the first week of opening.

A seamless customer experience for vendors on the Commercial Bay App was enabled by an online order operator app, integrations with POS, payment, and eCommerce platforms, and a programme of education and training with operators. We used Big Commerce for the multi-vendor marketplace, which had zero fees for tenants and enabled customers to order from multiple operators and only pay once.

Key insight

The first step was an in-depth immersion into what trust means today by applying the principles of Lean Product Development and Human-centred Design. We conducted over 75 hours of primary research into customers and observed behavioural patterns around "trust" when travelling, paying, proving identity, and applying for products and services. We also incorporated research into decentralised technology and meta-trends that drive investor engagement in the sector.

We unpacked the knowledge of the founders, who opened our minds to how a decentralised identity ecosystem is the future of trust online. A vision started to take shape of a future-state industry where service providers can enable secure customer onboarding and access with less effort, identity verification, and complicated password requirements. We locked in on the idea of "Trust Technology" as a single organising idea for the brand and product, a concept that focused feature development and communicated our unique selling point.

We helped CentraPass articulate their vision and values and laid the foundations for growth with a new purpose: ‘build a digital village where everyone can trust each other again." We brought the development team into this process to ensure we were all aligned with the common intent and aspirations of the team.

Key insight

Several months of development and customer testing resulted in a go-to-market strategy that included a consumer product in the tourism and hospitality sectors to "prove the technology worked" and a core enterprise product enabling the public and private sectors to embed "trust technology" into their customer experiences. We chose this approach because we believed we needed to "make a market"—prove the concept can add value in a popular sector—then use this awareness to stimulate demand. After successfully launching the product and proving the technology can work, we handed the consumer product to a partner to develop further, then doubled down on the development of the enterprise product.

Key Insight

By 2022, CentraPass had found a niche in the customer identity and access management sector and was gaining traction in the market. This took tenacity and patience from the founder, Andy Higgs, who never stopped believing. We had become a business all about making transactions online easier and reducing the risk of fraud or identity theft. After securing additional funding, we developed the most comprehensive digital enterprise identity toolkit for the New Zealand public and private sectors. Our products are now helping customers bridge the gap between physical and digital identities, where no correlative signatures are shared by their end users and their digital identity is truly under their control and for their eyes only. The net result is better privacy, a better customer experience (i.e., no passwords), and time savings from smarter KYC compliance processes that are streamlined.

Key Insight

The first step was a customer-centred discovery phase. We wanted to road test the value proposition with real people and challenge assumptions about the product. We helped the founders build empathy with the people who would use their product and learn what benefits they really wanted. We applied the principles of lean product development and human-centred design and conducted over 50 hours of primary research. Our team observed behavioural patterns around investing and wealth creation and documented the ways people told stories about the future, which helped the founders understand and tap into the underlying values and purpose driving decision-making. To frame these insights, we incorporated research into adjacent and industry social patterns in the sector, creating the context to construct overviews and evaluate opportunities.

We also took the time to unpack the knowledge and intentions of the founders and build a deep understanding of the proprietary technology they had developed, their underlying values, and their motivations for starting the business. These insights were fundamental for the brand purpose and vision of the business.

The process assisted the founders in defining a target customer who were lifelong learners with long-term financial goals. They don't like to dabble or engage in "get rich quick" concepts and understand that spending time researching and doing due diligence in the early days can pay dividends in the long run.

Key Insight

The discovery phase increased Flint Wealths' awareness in six critical areas for success when bringing a new product to market: (1) a technical awareness; (2) an understanding of why innovation needs to occur, addressing short- and long-term goals and risk versus profit; (3) the financial costs of innovation; (4) an understanding of who wants this innovation, at what price, and how to achieve it; (5) its allure to investors; and finally (6) the trust, competence, and motivation of the individuals involved.

We used customer data to define exactly what benefits we needed to deliver and the metrics for success, then overlaid a framework to prioritise each benefit that balanced the importance of customer need with user satisfaction with their current solution. This enabled us to identify the benefits that would have the biggest customer impact. We articulated and organised the value proposition around the signature benefits (one-of-a-kind, wow features), performance benefits, and brilliant basics (essential, box must be checked customer requirements).

The use of video customer verbatims and stakeholder engagement with the board built confidence in the executive and supported decisions to invest in the design and build. We transitioned into the product design phase and started to create prototypes for testing. Lean product development encourages rapid iterations, so we set up a series of sprints where different features or designs could be tested with users in short bursts. Feedback from users was integrated into future versions of the prototype until the desired outcome had been achieved.

Key Insight

In 8 weeks, we designed multiple prototypes of the product and fine-tuned the customer experience with usability testing, interviews with users, and field studies (observing how users interact with the service). These techniques help ensure that any changes made throughout the iterative process keep customers’ needs at heart by making sure they understand how they interact with different parts of the app's interface.

It was essential to evaluate the final version of the app before moving into a development phase. To achieve this, we used both qualitative (user interviews) and quantitative methods (benchmarking performance against industry standards). This helped reduce the likelihood that features that were not valued by customers would be built and that all customer requirements had been met or exceeded in terms of ease-of-use and functionality.

Key Insights

The project began with an in-depth discovery process, where we worked with the Epay team to define the scope of the project, including the core requirements, potential pitfalls and opportunities, and desired features. We immersed ourselves in the hospitality and tourism sectors, shadowing front-of-house in business restaurants in New Zealand and taking field trips to busy tourism information centres to truly understand their pain points.

From apps to ticketing services and payments, we observed how operators are struggling with fragmentation in their tech infrastructure. This fragmentation poses problems both for customers who find it difficult to effectively use the resources offered as well as operators dealing with different systems that don’t always integrate easily. The lack of standards in technology frameworks further exacerbates these issues and makes it difficult to develop consistent and innovative solutions that align with customer expectations.

Prototypes for the core discovery, ordering, and transaction flows were created for user testing with staff, operations teams, and customers. After validating the journey and value proposition, we completed the UI with an updated look and feel and a new brand designed by And Now.

Key Insights

We developed an architecture that helped create better cohesion between the underlying technologies, helping to ensure tourism operators don’t fall behind in an increasingly competitive market. We leveraged CentraPass trust technology and allowed payments within the restaurants and hotels, connecting to the POS and DPS payment gateways. The architecture had to support operators with a wide range of technical capabilities and scale, from small family businesses to large corporations.

In the delivery phase, we provided front-end development, web development, QA testing, and product management capabilities. Our backend development team validated technical assumptions, developed features, and provided working source code as well as other software deliverables.

The final solution was a mobile app for iOS and Android, designed and delivered within 12 weeks. We supported Go to Market activities with content creation, sales toolkits, and participation in trade shows throughout New Zealand to assist the Epay team in building awareness amongst prospective customers.