Educational App Development of Corporate Education App

How this all started

Originally there was a social app which trained and educated student volunteers from ThinkImpact, a US non-profit organization. But it soon became clear that the app’s scope is much broader than teaching students. Thus, Unleesh turned into a corporate B2B app for employee training.

It was meant to be a global project. So the goal was global too: to launch the app running on different platforms seamlessly and reach thousands of users around the world.

How it’s supposed to work

A company representative creates a Path — a curriculum designed to provide staff with new skills and competencies. Employees register in the app, log on and select the Path. After that, they are immediately taken to an Action — a specific micro-learning module that they are asked to complete.

For each completed Action users receive points. It makes the learning process more interactive and entertaining. Users can also talk with their path mates using either chat or private message. Thus users can ask for advice, get mental support and encouragement, share goals and experiences, see how they follow the same way, etc.

From idea to launch

Three launches actually: native apps for iOS and Android, as well as a web application. The client had just a prototype and the main idea of how a finished mobile app should work. On the basis of this, we developed three apps from scratch.

The first one was an iOS app. We created a frontend based on the client’s needs and vision of the app. The functionality required for creating and managing Paths was implemented on a complex backend. After a few QA rounds, we released Unleesh to the App Store successfully and on time.

But the customer soon realized their understanding of the app was incomplete. It became clear that the app needed to be improved to better communicate Unleesh ideas and principles. So the client came up with a major style and functionality redesign with a better UI/UX. We reworked lots of screens, added new important features, but saved the existing architecture. Our team stayed focused and got everything done quickly to meet the originally estimated deadline. We were on fire and released both iOS and Android apps at the same time.

Although Unleesh was created as a mobile-first platform, after a while it was realized that some of the corporate customers required a web-version. So that’s what we implemented next, and Unleesh became available on all screens.

Challenging moments

Here’s one: we were still working on the app when Parse announced they were going to shut down Parse Push service. It was used in Unleesh, so we had to migrate to another push notification service.

Another tricky part was to make sure all the user-generated media content can be viewed on all platforms, including videos and audio recorded from different devices and OS in different formats. It took a while, but we figured it out.

But the most challenging moment was to manage the frequently changing requirements. We handled it with an Agile approach, perfect project manager’s performance, 24/7 contact with the client, and an extremely high degree of motivation.

Summing up

Today, over 20,000 workforce learners have used Unleesh. It’s a working tool for dozens of organizations, including global ones such as The United Nations and World Learning.

Like many other startups, Unleesh LLC used trial and error. And we were on that same journey with them. We built Unleesh from the ground up, and we’re still working on platform support and further improvement.