Hank's Fine Furniture App
About Hank's
Founded in 1975 by Hank Browne, Hank's Fine Furniture has grown to 14 stores in 4 states and is one of America's Top 100 Independent Furniture Retailers. From the very beginning, Hank's Fine Furniture's success has been built on offering quality furniture, bedding and accessories at excellent values. As a family-owned business, Hank's Fine Furniture has thrived because of our dedication to service after the sale. You, the customer, have been the most important part of our business for over 40 years.
About The Project
Mission: Create iOS / Android app for company that includes coupon/loyalty program for users.
Technologies Used: Goodbarber mobile app builder, Photoshop, HTML & CSS
Links
Assets I created using Photoshop
Mockups I was given:
Video Demo
Summary
This was an exciting project because I love this company. I remember Hank's commercial's from when I was little kid. My brothers and I would say the famous Hank's slogan "Hank's ... FINNNNNE Furniture :D".
At first, I thought would be that I would need to custom code the entire application as I had done with my Capstone project in college. I made a Mobile attendence taking application for highschools and colleges, that still isn't finished today. So I had no experience coding apps for iPhone, but I was ready to learn. We ended up doing research and decided to go with an app building tool because it would save time and money, and Goodbarber had great looking designs. They also provided a service of going through the Review process with Apple. If you want to publish an iPhone app you have to go through this review process with Apple and you may or may not get accepted into their App Store based on a number of things, included your app not having a good purpose/use to users, their are similar apps. The app can't just be an advertisement, it has to provide good tools for the users, whatever that may be. And Goodbarber did all that all for you as well as decreasing the time needed to be spent on design and coding.
However, Goodbarber had some limitations, as any tool like this will. You don't actually have access to any source code in your Goodbarber application, all you have is an administration dashboard that lets create pre-built widgets on your mobile app, and you could create your own custom ones, which I actually had to do for two pages in Hank's app. Goodbarber provides what is called a Progressive Web App, which basically means it is one single application that is a Website and a mobile app with only one source code. And they had a custom widget you could create with HTML / CSS which I found really cool because you didn't have to know any Java or Swift to create the page. So I created a "Deliveries" page and a "Financing" page with custom HTML code I wrote. The Deliveries page we ended up ditching because of a mobile responsive issue, but I did get it working with their delivery companies API, where on the "Deliveries" page the user could type in their order number and see a lot of data regarding their furniture delivery order. The "Financing" page which more simple. It was just banner images and buttons linking to their finacing page on the web. Overall, really fun project that we got up and running in less than 2 weeks.
