We are very excited to announce that the new members app for Norths Collective, a dynamic profit-for-purpose hospitality group, designed and developed by reinteractive, has been launched!
The app is live in App Stores and available for download and use by the members.
Screenshots of the new Mobile App
The native mobile only app is designed to serve a wide range of services for the members, including a digital membership card, membership renewal, browsing and booking shows by venue, booking in-venue restaurants and tracking points and membership status.
reinteractive started the development process with a UX workshop back in 2020, developing through the hospitality industry shut downs to deliver the app to the Norths Collective team.
Throughout we worked closely with the team at Norths, as well as the Salesforce Partner to deliver a unique app that is perfectly customised for the group, and sets the pace for the rest of the industry in Australia.
Robert Lopez, GM – CX, Brand and Innovation Norths Collective (L) with Liam Webb, Digital Integration & Analytics Specialist at Norths Collective (R)
The application has been built using Ruby on Rails in the backend, and React Native for the front end, which then compiles to the appropriate languages for the relevant app stores. This is a good flexible language for mobile app development. The backend can be easily added to without difficulty with releases from the testing environment to the live version being immediate. Ruby on Rails is an excellent language for ease of programming and collaboration among a team. React Native is a flexible JS framework that allows for all of the features of mobile development, and only needs to be written once but is deployed to different stores. It simply interfaces with the Rails backend.
The application is hosted on Heroku, and further integrates with Salesforce using the proprietary Heroku Connect tool set. Using Heroku means that Salesforce and Marketing Cloud first-party data can be quickly and easily leveraged in the app. It also means that scaling can be easily achieved and new users jumping on to the app in the early days will never suffer a slowdown due to concurrent users exceeding bandwidth.
We were also able to integrate the app with several third-party applications, including venue booking tools, individual venue websites, payment features and much more to extend the functionality.
Talking about the development process, Robert Lopez from Norths Collective said the following:
"Great communication was definitely the number one highlight of working with the reinteractive team. We had daily stand ups during the project duration which I blocked off and dedicated the time to.
“Number two was the expertise capability I experienced. Everyone I have dealt with from Sales through to the phenomenal UX Designer showed that the capability is very strong within reinteractive. A huge part of this is the methodology used. It is very structured, and strong, so you know exactly what is being done and it is easy to monitor the project’s progress.
“In the end it has been such a smooth process. Much smoother than I ever thought it was going to be.”
Robert Lopez, GM – CX, Brand and Innovation
Norths Collective
You can read more about the development process of the application in this Case Study.
