Audio Tour Guide App Development for Art & History Lovers

The Client

Becoming acquainted with art and history in museums and galleries is quite a personal matter, but now this has been made even more personal by Expo, an Australia-based startup Azoft is proud to have helped launch.

“We came to Azoft through the recommendation of another happy customer. We had a vision and specification, and they provided the outstanding technical capability delivering above and beyond our expectations. Our work included a mobile app development with a web server that fully met our requirements, but what is more important – the needs of our clients. We have worked closely with the project team, who had been very responsive and came up with cost-effective solutions to any issues that came up during the development process. The project was delivered on time and within the agreed budget. Overall, we are very happy with the solution developed by Azoft – our clients are satisfied and we have not identified a single bug during the 6 months of a production run.” — Niklas Olsson, Co-founder at Expi

The Scope

Developed in Drupal 7, Expi turns visitors’ iPhones into a personal guide for many museums and galleries in Australia. The audio tour guide app comprises:

• an iPhone app allowing users to search for, download, and use audio tours as well as leave feedback and share experiences over social networks
• TMS – a Tour Management System allowing museums and galleries to create high-quality tour guides, i.e. to combine information, visuals, and audio files and make that content available to app users
• an accompanying marketing website that advertises audio tours and allows them to be shared over social networks, e.g. Facebook and Twitter

The Solution

The Azoft team developed the site, app, and TMS for Expi’s partners, allowing them to create and maintain audio tours for museums and galleries. One very important function of the system is the gathering of statistics on tours that are bought and downloaded.

We created two types of tours for this project: default tours and museum-specific tours, which can be bought by using the in-app purchase function, entering a special code or by installing it in an app by default.

An interaction between the app and the TMS is implemented using a JSON-based API developed by our team, which allows the app to receive data and update statistics.

The app is available in AppStore.

Technologies

iOS 6 and 7, Drupal 7, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery

The Outcome

As a startup, Expi now has a smooth, intuitive app for users and a convenient tool for business partners who would like to join the project. As a developer, Azoft took real pleasure in participating in the launch of a new successful startup. Expi were also very pleased with the results. The level of trust we earned from our client was such that Expi has recommended Azoft to their partners.

Since launch, Expi has been improving the app and have passed their findings on to our team. After discussing future perspectives, we have decided to keep the project moving forward with new exciting features for history and art lovers.