Queen's University needed a modern solution to manage its virtual classroom experience, a critical tool for conducting remote learning across geographically dispersed campuses. Their legacy video conferencing system, based on Polycom RX, was aging and no longer meeting their growing needs for usability, flexibility, and security.
Pexip, the video conferencing technology partner that handles the backend of these calls, introduced HFC to build a new front-end interface from scratch, one that could integrate with Pexip while it would continue handling the backend infrastructure for video conferencing. This meant the front-end could be fully custom, but it had to interact cleanly with Pexip&rsquo;s architecture.
<h2>The challenge</h2>
When Queen&rsquo;s University engaged HFC, they faced multiple challenges&mdash;technical, organizational, and timeline-related&mdash;that were all intertwined.&nbsp;
The initial discovery process revealed a massive list of highly specific requirements, stemming from the team&rsquo;s unique workflows and the specialized roles involved in each call. For example, this new system needed to support secure logins, curated call lists, dynamic screen displays, and strict controls over who could speak, when, and how participants were displayed. On top of that, legal considerations around intellectual property and participant rights required rigor in both the interface&rsquo;s design and backend data handling.
An outdated system Their existing Polycom RX setup was inflexible, hard to use, and increasingly unsupported. Queen's needed a completely new interface that could support complex roles and user flows, such as customizing speaker layouts, managing participants, and enforcing strict communications protocols.
Updated requirements to meet real needs The initial requirements were shaped at a strategic level, but as the project progressed and the team engaged more directly with classroom operators, it became clear that their day-to-day needs called for a different focus. The solution needed to align more closely with real-world workflows and user expectations.
Tight timeline and budget With a fixed budget and limited time, the project had to be scoped and delivered as a minimal viable product (MVP), with ongoing iterative improvements.
Third-party API complexity While Pexip&rsquo;s APIs offered very robust capabilities, their integration required close coordination due to certain variables in documentation and behavior. Through ongoing collaboration and HFC&rsquo;s deep technical expertise that enabled them to create solutions out of an otherwise bespoke environment, HFC worked through these challenges.&nbsp;
Queen's University chose HFC to help them:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Design and build a user-friendly, operator-focused front end that minimizes complexity</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Create a lightweight MVP that delivered immediate value while allowing for future enhancements</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Navigate ambiguous and evolving requirements by staying close to operators and iterating quickly</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Implement a secure, self-hosted deployment architecture for Queen's&rsquo; network environment</li>
</ul>
<h2>The approach</h2>
HFC&rsquo;s success with Queen's and Pexip was rooted in its collaborative, flexible, and technically robust process.
Starting with proof of concept The engagement began with a proof of concept to demonstrate feasibility&mdash;deployed internally by HFC to validate integration with Pexip. This early validation was instrumental in gaining trust from both Pexip and Queen's, setting the stage for a fast-moving development process.
Iterative development and continuous feedback With the MVP scope aligned, HFC prioritized must-have features by working directly with the operators&mdash;the people who would be using the system every day. Out of an initial list of nearly a hundred potential functionalities, roughly 30 core elements, including conference video capabilities and call operator controls, were selected for the first release. This helped reduce noise and focus on delivering value quickly.
Through weekly check-ins, the team was able to continue moving and adapting quickly, uncovering gaps in the original requirements and identifying high-impact features to replace lower-priority tasks. This allowed the team to seamlessly reallocate efforts toward what truly mattered to end users.
The platform was built using Next.js, which offered both performance and flexibility for rapid development. For lightweight, local data handling, HFC chose to use SQLite, which simplified state management without adding unnecessary infrastructure complexity. This streamlined stack supported a fast MVP turnaround while remaining easy to maintain and iterate on.
Designing for usability and control The custom interface enabled operators to manage virtual classrooms easily&mdash;switching layouts, highlighting speakers, and moving participants across breakout rooms. HFC also introduced proactive alerting features that surfaced call quality issues to operators in real-time, replacing the need for them to manually sift through logs or dashboards.
Overcoming technical hurdles One of the key technical challenges involved working with Pexip&rsquo;s APIs, which required close collaboration due to limited documentation and variations across environments. This close collaboration with real-time communication enabled both teams to align quickly, troubleshoot efficiently, and ultimately build a stable foundation for the integration.
Secure and automated deployment Because Queen's required the platform to be hosted on their internal network for compliance and security, HFC implemented a custom Ansible-based DevOps setup. This allowed for automatic deployment from GitHub to Queen's&rsquo; Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) servers, with minimal manual intervention and full control over the hosting environment.
<h2>The results</h2>
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">A tailored MVP delivered on time: HFC launched a fully functional MVP empowering operators with the tools they needed while laying the groundwork for future features.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Improved usability and operational control: The new interface reduced operator training needs and increased efficiency. Features like real-time alerts and simplified conference management dramatically improved usability compared to the existing Polycom interface.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Reliable, secure deployment: The platform runs securely on Queen's&rsquo; own servers, meeting strict internal IT and privacy requirements.</li>
</ul>
The collaboration between HFC and Queen&rsquo;s has not only overcome significant technical and operational hurdles but also laid the groundwork for a scalable, adaptable platform. The success of this project has already sparked interest from other major institutions&mdash;Cornell University, has also adopted this video conferencing platform, validating its utility and scalability in a broader academic context.&nbsp;
This cross-institutional traction highlights not only the solution&rsquo;s versatility, but also a growing momentum across higher education for adopting new technology. The HFC team continues to work with Queen&rsquo;s and support ongoing maintenance and incremental improvements, with regular updates driven by operator feedback.
Whether you're modernizing legacy systems or building from the ground up, HFC can help you deliver intuitive, secure, and scalable solutions&mdash;on time and on budget. <a href="https://www.happyfuncorp.com/contact-us">Let&rsquo;s talk about your project</a>

Escaping Legacy Tech: How HFC Designed a Custom Virtual Classroom Solution for Queen’s University

When a prominent art collection and educational institution was looking to undertake an ambitious new technology-centered project, it had a few unique considerations in mind.
What sets this institution apart&mdash;which holds one of the world&rsquo;s greatest collections of impressionist, post-impressionist, and modern art&mdash;is its dedication to using technology to inspire, delight, and educate visitors, as well as the mandated lack of contextual information on the gallery walls (to encourage visitors to focus their attention on the art).&nbsp;
As part of this focus, its technology and innovation team set out to create a new interpretive guide to its extensive art collection&mdash;that works on any smartphone with a web browser.&nbsp;
But it wasn&rsquo;t just a matter of building an app that would leverage smartphones&rsquo; cameras to pop up information&mdash;the content needed to be helpful, concise, and personalized.
To build this, the institution needed a partner with technical expertise and skills in building innovative mobile experiences and seamless user interfaces.
<h2>The challenge</h2>
From early meetings with the client, one thing was clear to the HFC team: even though the art institution wanted to engage visitors through their smartphones, it was not looking for a mobile application.&nbsp;
The team didn&rsquo;t want to ask visitors to download yet another app to their phones&mdash;this would create friction in the experience, and deter visitors from actually using their solution to learn more about the art.&nbsp;&nbsp;
However, they still wanted to present museum visitors with information about the collection in a concise and seamless way, especially because there are no plaques on the walls.
Besides the client&rsquo;s requirements, there were a few other constraints. Because the biggest consideration in any museum or gallery is the safety of the collection, immersive technology is difficult to execute and can be risky. The client&rsquo;s museum space in particular has some smaller rooms that have to hold large crowds of people at times, which means the audio guides that are frequently used in many popular museums today would be problematic in those spaces.&nbsp;
On top of that, the collection&rsquo;s content is static, meaning visitors will typically stay in the same place for a long time, which creates very predictable bottlenecks in the galleries. This was especially important because of the capacity limits that the team had to consider&mdash;the collection gallery can accommodate only 250 visitors at any given time. HFC&rsquo;s solution would need to distribute content in a lightweight and flexible way that keeps movement in the gallery fluid.
The client chose HFC to help them:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Ideate and prototype mobile-friendly options for its visitors that take into account the museum&rsquo;s unique set of physical considerations</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Design a seamless interface that swiftly delivered helpful content in a manner that mitigated visitor bottleneck</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Engineer, test, and launch a digital experience that balances critical knowledge sharing while maintaining the visitor&rsquo;s immersive in-person experience</li>
</ul>
<h2>HFC&rsquo;s approach</h2>
HFC explored a variety of potential solutions that could provide an app-free experience while still leveraging mobile devices. One of these ideas was to build a prototype of a wearable (such as an Apple Watch), but the team ultimately determined that wearables weren&rsquo;t the best solution for providing information about the collection in a concise way.
After these explorations, HFC landed on a solution that met all of the client&rsquo;s requirements. The team would create a mobile-optimized web page that could access users&rsquo; smartphone cameras so that when they walked through the small rooms of the museum, they could easily scan a piece of art to learn more about each one.&nbsp;
Another unique element that HFC integrated was the &ldquo;room&rdquo; or collection story, which let visitors know a bit more about why certain pieces were placed in specific rooms and how they connected to other pieces in the space. This way, visitors could better understand the thematic connections between the artwork, enhancing their appreciation of the overall narrative and gaining deeper insights into the curator's vision for each room&mdash;all without having to download anything onto their phones.
Because the collection guides had to be translated into multiple languages, HFC leveraged a combination of translations and Google Translate API.&nbsp;
Post-visit experience
At the end of a visit, users could enter their email addresses to get an &ldquo;End of Visit&rdquo; recap with a summary of all the artwork that was scanned during the visit. This would extend visitor engagement and allow them to continue connecting with the art even after they&rsquo;ve left the galleries.&nbsp;
Tech stack
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Frontend: HFC used React for the frontend Javascript framework, GSAP (an animation library), Bootstrap CSS (for the UI and CSS library), and ScrollMagic, which provided scroll-based animation for search results. </li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Backend: On the backend, HFC used Active Admin for admin users and ElasticSearch to cache artwork information, which could then be queried when users scanned artwork with their cameras. </li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Other services: The final major piece was Catchoom Image Recognition, which let users point their phone camera at the artwork to pull up more information about each piece. The app would capture a few scans automatically and send it to Catchoom, which matched those scans against its library of art (cached in ElasticSearch).</li>
</ul>
<h2>The result: An engaging, app-free way to learn more about art</h2>
Almost two million scans by museum visitors later, this collaboration highlights how technology can be creatively applied to enhance visitor engagement, without compromising the museum experience.&nbsp;
By rethinking the traditional app experience, HFC helped remove barriers to access and streamline the process for visitors to interact with this remarkable collection of masterpieces. The integration of real-time image recognition, multilingual support, and a personalized post-visit experience not only addressed the client's needs but also helped drive the institution's commitment to innovation, shaping the future of museum engagement.
Looking for ways to enrich an in-person experience and create meaningful connections with your audience using innovative technology?
<a href="https://www.happyfuncorp.com/contact-us">Let&rsquo;s chat!</a>

Reimagining Visitor Engagement: Building a Seamless, App-free Mobile Experience for a World-Class Art Collection

Axoni, a trusted partner to some of the world&rsquo;s leading financial institutions, specializes in blockchain software development. Their cutting-edge platform, HYDRA, enables real-time data replication across multiple destinations, significantly reducing reconciliations, data pipeline management costs, and risk.&nbsp;
Because of the data-heavy, high-stakes nature of the financial markets, HYDRA is especially useful in this industry for enabling continuous alignment of trade data between different parties, handling amendments, and resolving discrepancies in data.
Specifically, they built two products&mdash;Stellar and Veris. Whereas Stellar was for confirming and amending trades, Veris was for reconciling inconsistencies in data. In other words, Axoni had two products that did different things, using a shared underlying technology.
But with Axoni&rsquo;s only designer leaving the team, the company faced a critical challenge in maintaining the visual and user experience integrity for its products. To keep pace with developer needs and an ambitious upcoming roadmap, they needed a solution that could ensure both consistency and scalability.
<h2>The challenge</h2>
When Axoni brought on HFC to provide strategic design support and help align their product development and design, they were facing two primary pain points:
A fragmented design system&nbsp;
The existing design files were inconsistent, with many versions of different features, minimal use of components, and an outdated component library that was applied unevenly across the HYDRA products. This fragmentation created significant obstacles for the product teams, who needed a streamlined, unified design approach to maintain product continuity and reduce development inefficiencies. On top of that, not having a unified design system limited Axoni&rsquo;s team in their ability to iterate quickly and adapt to the different requirements for Veris and Stellar, each of which served distinct branding and user experience goals. 
A transition gap
Compounding the design challenges, Axoni&rsquo;s sole designer was leaving the company, and there was an extremely short transition period with little to no handoff time. This put the team at risk of losing design continuity and critical product knowledge as they moved forward with a major development roadmap for Veris and Stellar.
Axoni chose HFC to help them:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Support both Veris&rsquo; and Stellar&rsquo;s product teams with their immediate feature needs</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Organize and standardize product files to ensure they reflected the latest state of the products and incorporated consistent use of components, styles, and the existing component library</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Move toward a new unified design system that enables both products to adopt a shared library and supports light and dark themes, instead of the current separate design styles for each theme</li>
</ul>
<h2>The approach</h2>
HFC&rsquo;s immediate priority was to bridge these gaps, quickly assessing and immersing the team in Axoni&rsquo;s existing work to ensure a smooth transition and avoid delays.
Targeted feature development Collaborating with Axoni&rsquo;s product leads, HFC&rsquo;s team rapidly developed new features by making the most of the brief dedicated product sessions and learning on the fly while working on more minor features.&nbsp;
This allowed HFC to deliver functional updates and solutions that aligned with Veris&rsquo; and Stellar&rsquo;s branding and design, which ensured continuity for the Axoni team while minimizing disruption during the design transition.&nbsp;
Streamlining and organization design files At the same time, HFC had to overhaul the disorganized and incomplete design files they inherited, which lacked consistency in the use of components and styles. The team recognized that a more structured approach was needed to ensure that the designs reflected the current product.&nbsp;
Both Veris&rsquo; and Stellar&rsquo;s product teams had agreed to use Mantine as their component library, but they were at different stages of implementation. To simplify things and maintain consistency, HFC simply duplicated the library and standardized the colors and typography so that both product files had the same set of colors and type styles.&nbsp;
The team also found a way to efficiently support both light and dark themes for Veris and Stellar by recreating Mantine's logic in Figma using variables. This made it possible to seamlessly toggle between light and dark themes without duplicating components&mdash;and allowed for more efficient and flexible design updates going forward.
Establishing a unified design system
While Stellar&rsquo;s look and feel are informed by LSEG colors, Veris follows Axoni&rsquo;s color palette. This meant that when creating the light and dark themes, HFC needed to also build in flexibility to switch between these distinct sets of core colors.&nbsp;
Even though the long-term goal was to unify both products around a single color scheme, that wasn't feasible for the live product at the time. To address this, the DLS file allowed developers to continue working with Veris&rsquo; existing colors while providing the ability to switch to the new unified color scheme when needed. Even though the initial complexity of setting up the design file was a more demanding task, it ultimately paid off because it supported the evolving needs of the project.
<h2>The results</h2>
Today, both Veris and Stellar share a unified design library that supports both light and dark modes. Both products are now using a system that is versatile enough to accommodate client partner branding and marketing requests, enabling seamless brand-level updates to the platform.
HFC played a critical role in developing and refining these products, ultimately helping position them for acquisition by LSEG&mdash;a major milestone&mdash;and ensuring a smooth transition. With this successful collaboration behind them, HFC looks forward to working with Axoni again as they continue to push the boundaries of blockchain technology.
 Need to unify design systems or streamline your product's user experience? Reach out to learn more!&nbsp;
<a href="https://www.happyfuncorp.com/contact-us">Let&rsquo;s chat</a>

From fragmentation to a cohesive identity: Designing a scalable system for Axoni’s blockchain platform 

<a href="https://www.architecturaldesigns.com/?srsltid=AfmBOors3rRWU7bnRM9seeKUS06NXtXMlN9noAHo6dvp01Kdx0-IdE8O">Architectural Designs </a> (AD) is the leading house plan source in the United States. As a family-owned business (four generations and counting!), Architectural Designs is dedicated to providing the highest-quality home plans from over 200 of the world&rsquo;s best architects and designers.
AD&rsquo;s business transitioned from mail-order to virtual in the early 2000s, and its web presence has gone through multiple iterations over the last 20 years to keep up with the changing technological landscape.&nbsp;
Though AD&rsquo;s decade-old website served them well, AD needed to invest in new technologies to succeed in a competitive market.
The challenge: Build a more customer-forward, technologically-advanced website in three months
HFC&rsquo;s evaluation of AD&rsquo;s online presence led to three major takeaways:
<ol>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Slow page load times, low interaction scores, and high error rates led to lagging site health metrics</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">An overly complex codebase was slowing down feature development</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">The website&rsquo;s look and feel were outdated, and there were design inconsistencies across AD&rsquo;s web presence. AD needed a design system to scale design updates and scale UX improvements.</li>
</ol>
These three findings signaled that AD&rsquo;s business would benefit from a modernized front-end tech stack. HFC understood AD&rsquo;s business and users, and AD knew that they could trust HFC to build them a long-lasting strategy for a stronger, leaner tech stack and improved user experience.
<a href="https://codex.happyfuncorp.com/how-to-know-its-time-to-modernize-your-tech-stack-4-warning-signs-6bbcd61af7e6">Check out our list of four signs that your tech stack needs an upgrade&nbsp;</a>
With Black Friday only a few months away, Architectural Designs wanted their website live to support the increased traffic and sales they anticipated. When the time came to make a radical change, AD knew that HFC was the best choice for the job: to modernize their tech stack and build a high-performing, resilient website.
Architectural Designs worked with HFC to:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Rebuild their front-end website from the ground up</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Optimize their website for speed and increased traffic</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Consult on strategy and scaling for long-term success</li>
</ul>
<h2>The solution: Migrate to Next.Js for increased speed, scalability, and resilience&nbsp;</h2>
HFC had three months to overcome the limitations and system constraints of Architectural Design&rsquo;s legacy Rails system and build a tech stack with shorter load times for increased traffic.
Though the timeline was tight, HFC built future feature updates into their plans: they built a front-end codebase based on Next.js that would speed up system and feature updates.&nbsp;
<ul>
<li aria-level="1">Moving from Rails to Next.js
<ul>
<li aria-level="1">Next.js is the preferred library for front-end developers, and developers who specialize in Rails are less common in today&rsquo;s market</li>
<li aria-level="1">Building in Next.js is faster and easier than Rails. By moving to Next.js, HFC was able to leverage a modern framework with a robust developer community to build faster</li>
<li aria-level="1">Faster feature development in Next.js allowed AD to act more quickly and iteratively on user feedback to increase user satisfaction and conversation rates</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Tackling performance issues
<ul>
<li aria-level="2">Migrating to Next.js, which renders with a hybrid of server-side and client-side, cut loading time in half</li>
<li aria-level="2">AD&rsquo;s initial server setup routed all requests to US-based servers, increasing load times for international users. Deploying Next.js across AWS and Cloudflare distributed their server locations, speeding up load times and making performance more consistent</li>
<li aria-level="2">Phased migration ensured minimal disruptions while enabling significant overall changes and enhancements</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Removing the limitations of legacy code
<ul>
<li aria-level="2">Writing front-end code with Rails was time-consuming and didn&rsquo;t allow for maximum design efficiency. Migrating to Next.js allowed developers to create a website that was pixel-perfect across all screen sizes</li>
<li aria-level="2">Working iteratively allowed developers to work faster and test frequently, ensuring page-by-page, line-by-line excellence for launch</li>
<li aria-level="2">Next.js&rsquo;s robust library makes it easy for developers to add and improve features, allowing AD to deploy UX improvements more frequently and deliver new features more quickly</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Strengthening AD&rsquo;s website infrastructure
<ul>
<li aria-level="2">On their legacy website, traffic spikes led to long load times. When HFC rebuilt AD&rsquo;s website, they worked in a containerized framework, allowing faster autoscaling</li>
<li aria-level="2">Rails-built websites can be more vulnerable to security threats because the technology is out-of-date. Migrating to Next.js increased developer flexibility and, most importantly, security updates</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li aria-level="1">Decreasing operational costs
<ul>
<li aria-level="1">Adopting containerization reduced infrastructure costs by up to 50%</li>
<li aria-level="1">Rails is a clunky library with significant run costs. Migrating to Next.js significantly cut AD&rsquo;s operational costs by increasing access to third-party integrations</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<h2>The results: Record-breaking Black Friday sales and flawless performance</h2>
HFC&rsquo;s strategy anticipated AD&rsquo;s growth goals and incorporated plans for a more resilient future. AD&rsquo;s migration to a more modern and flexible tech stack didn&rsquo;t just build them a better website &mdash; it strengthened their business, too, with a 40% year-over-year increase in user engagement after launch.
HFC&rsquo;s front-end updates didn&rsquo;t just make AD&rsquo;s website load faster and look better &mdash;&nbsp;they also helped AD&rsquo;s website become more competitive in a crowded SEO market. Mobile-friendliness is a critical component of SEO rankings; HFC knew this and incorporated responsive design and accessibility into their work to give AD&rsquo;s website that extra SEO boost.
Architectural Designs wanted their new website tested and live by Black Friday and the HFC team delivered. Working iteratively and testing pages throughout the development process allowed HFC to deliver a website with 100% uptime throughout their Black Friday traffic spike. AD&rsquo;s newly designed and rebuilt website helped bring in an entire year&rsquo;s sales in one day, with continued lasting increases in customer retention and satisfaction.
Architectural Design&rsquo;s new website&rsquo;s success by the numbers:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Mobile:&nbsp;</li>
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="2">41% increase in performance&nbsp;</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="2">50% increase in best practices</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="2">33% increase in SEO</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="2">10.3% increase in accessibility&nbsp;</li>
</ul>
</ul>
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Web:</li>
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="2">42% increase in best practices</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="2">33% increase in SEO score&nbsp;</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="2">17% increase in performance</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="2">17.7% increase in accessibility</li>
</ul>
</ul>
&ldquo;The integration of Next JS has significantly improved site speed across the AD platform and has optimized page load times in a meaningful way. This critical investment in our business was especially impactful during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale season, ensuring a seamless shopping experience under high traffic conditions. We saw increased engagement, higher conversion rates, and incredible overall results!&rdquo; - Kitty Connor, COO
Ready to modernize your tech stack? <a href="https://www.happyfuncorp.com/contact-us">Reach out to our team</a>

How Modernizing Their Tech Stack Helped Architectural Designs Achieve Record-Breaking Sales and Increase Their Conversation Rates

When one of the world&rsquo;s leading home design and furnishings companies decided to launch its new hospitality concept, it knew it had to provide a first-of-its-kind digital experience to accompany it.&nbsp;
Already known as a high-end luxury brand, it was imperative that this translated to the hotel experience, from the interior decor to the in-room amenities.
But as the first hotel&rsquo;s opening date slowly approached, there was still one crucial component in flux&mdash;the digital experience. The customized out-of-the-box solution provided by their prior partner left a lot to be desired.
HFC was brought in to take over and drive this critical project. The team&rsquo;s deadline: two months. The Internet of Things (IoT) app had to be architected, built, tested, and fully functioning for guests by opening day.
<h2>The challenge</h2>
To create a truly immersive space where guests could customize their in-room experience to be as comfortable as possible during their stay, HFC needed to design and build an iPad app from scratch that could control all of these elements and more. That meant building out a variety of integrations for each of those functions and developing custom APIs to ensure seamless communication between the app and the hotel's many systems, such as room management and dining services.
The client chose HFC to help them:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Take over a critical digital project. The client needed HFC to step in and lead the development of an essential IoT app after the original vendor failed to deliver.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Conduct extensive on-site testing for this unique environment.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Deliver an exceptional on-brand guest experience. As a premium lifestyle brand, design and aesthetics were a key consideration. HFC was tasked with creating a seamless, luxury-focused app that would control everything from check-in to room customization, ensuring a flawless experience for their guests.</li>
</ul>
<h2>HFC&rsquo;s approach</h2>
By analyzing what the previous vendor had tried to build and the pain points that surfaced as we were testing the app, we were able to quickly determine potential improvements that could be made and identify technical gaps that were hindering the app&rsquo;s performance, scalability, and overall user experience.&nbsp;
This allowed HFC to create a clear roadmap and conduct rapid prototyping to keep stakeholders&mdash;including the client&rsquo;s C-Suite team&mdash;aligned, while prioritizing the most critical integrations. These included:&nbsp;
Control of each guest room&rsquo;s lights, thermostat, motorized shades, and even exterior privacy lights.
Guests could set the temperature for either side of the advanced thermoregulated beds in each room.
For dine-in service, HFC built the CMS (content management system) for the restaurant menu in Contentful, which communicates with the Oracle restaurant system the client uses, Micros. Guests can place orders on the iPad app, which then print out tickets in the restaurant for the chefs. The system also tracks and updates inventory in real time.&nbsp;
Guests can turn on the TV and music through the app&rsquo;s AV integration.&nbsp;
The app also integrates with the client&rsquo;s hotel management system Opera to tell managers if guests are checked in, whether a room is occupied, and so on.
Besides these integrations, HFC also built other concierge features into the app to enhance the guest experience, such as the message hold function that lets guests send a message to the front desk and receive a response later via text message or via the app.
Once the app was completed, the final step was to conduct extensive on-site testing in each guest room.
<h2>The results: A luxurious digital hospitality experience, delivered on time</h2>
In the end, HFC not only met the ambitious two-month deadline, but also delivered an IoT app that transformed the guest experience, seamlessly integrating with the hotel&rsquo;s core systems.&nbsp;
The iPad app became a key element of the brand&rsquo;s pioneering hospitality experience. It allowed guests to easily control every aspect of their stay, and also gave the client back full control and transparency.
By stepping up at a critical moment and leveraging the team&rsquo;s deep technical expertise and flexibility, HFC helped the client successfully launch its hospitality business, ensuring that the digital experience matched the same high standards as its luxury home furnishings brand.
Need help with creating a premium digital experience that seamlessly integrates different solutions?
<a href="https://www.happyfuncorp.com/contact-us">Let&rsquo;s chat!&nbsp;</a>

From Design to Delivery: Building an IoT iPad App for a Luxury Hotel Launch

As Disney first began expanding its content and streaming offerings, it had a vision of a unified movie licensing ecosystem: an OTT (over-the-top) product that lets viewers stream and download purchased films&mdash;from any streaming platform.
Disney had already worked out deals with major digital content stores such as Apple TV+, Amazon, and Google to allow people to sync Disney films purchased from these stores. The next step was to build a solution that would not only collect all of this content into a single library that&rsquo;s available across any device but also act as a cloud-based digital rights locker.
Movies Anywhere marked a huge step forward in Disney's digital strategy&mdash;one that&rsquo;s differentiated from all of the other major studios.
Disney needed a partner that could handle both the depth and breadth of such an ambitious project, with a skilled team that had experience in event tracking, encrypted DRM video streams, and building against evolving APIs to build a great user experience.&nbsp;
<h2>The challenge</h2>
The goal was clear: to design and build a quality experience worthy of the Disney brand&mdash;intuitive, innovative, imaginative&mdash;and available on a variety of living room platforms, from Apple TV to Roku and Google TV.
Each of these players and libraries required the ability to show each user&rsquo;s unified catalog such that someone using Apple TV could connect and see their Google Play purchases as well, without having to open the Movies Anywhere client app.
The challenge, of course, is that each platform has its own conventions, technical limitations, and idiosyncrasies. The promise of &ldquo;buy once, watch anywhere&rdquo; only works if a customer&rsquo;s preferred device supports the service, and the Movies Anywhere app would be available for iOS, Apple TV, Android, Android TV, Amazon Fire devices, and Roku. It also needed to support Chromecast, with titles being watchable through the service&rsquo;s standalone website.&nbsp;
To add to the challenge, branding work was still in progress, which meant the HFC team was actively building the Roku and Apple TV applications against the API&mdash;while designs were still being created and tested.&nbsp;
<h2>HFC&rsquo;s approach</h2>
HFC worked with Movies Anywhere&rsquo;s product team to understand the product requirements and limitations of this new shared ecosystem where studios would rely on a single library of assets for their films.&nbsp;
Due to the nature of building a shared library, HFC had to adhere to a specific set of guidelines for image usage, aspect ratios, and safety areas that could be used (to accommodate text).&nbsp;
At the start of the project, HFC met with the Movies Anywhere team to share research on the living room app space, before beginning to design demos and concepts for the Movies Anywhere app.&nbsp;
Many of the app&rsquo;s ingredients beyond the core feature set&mdash;such as extensive event tracking and encrypted DRM video streams&mdash;were familiar to the HFC team.
Using Brightscript, HFC wrote custom code pieces for Roku and tvOS, and developed the Roku channel completely from scratch. The team built numerous major features, including:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">User onboarding flows for both signup and sign-in. HFC designed the ability to log in via a code (what Roku calls &ldquo;rendezvous linking&rdquo;) and also a simple login flow UI that can be controlled with a few clicks on the remote.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Creating and maintaining user profiles. When logged in, the user is presented with a profile selection page where they can create a new profile. The content would then be personalized for the profile on the backend. </li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">A smooth browsing experience using GraphQL in the backend to efficiently aggregate data (including metadata and assets) from multiple sources and make it available to the front-end clients. </li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Custom UI features such as:</li>
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="2">A &ldquo;speed scroll&rdquo; feature when a user long-presses the up or down key while browsing content.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="2">Movie detail pages that show all metadata (like the synopsis, bonus content, and cast &amp; crew) and allow users to continue watching where they left off.&nbsp;</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="2">Closed captions that pop up temporarily when the user rewinds or fast-forwards, to help them quickly see where they are in the story.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="2">A sortable movie library view. For example, users can sort movies by release date, franchise, and timeline. </li>
</ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">A bookmark feature. Movies are bookmarked where users leave off and they can continue watching, even on other linked platforms.</li>
</ul>
<h2>The results</h2>
After only nine months, the HFC team delivered a new Movies Anywhere app that provided a deeply unified movie viewing ecosystem where titles could be streamed and also downloaded for offline viewing, and where purchases made from the Google Play store on one device showed up in the Movies Anywhere library of another&mdash;nearly instantly.
And with generous playback and registered device limitations, as well as support for secondary accounts, parents can hand off a tablet without worrying their eight-year-old will watch Goodfellas instead of The Good Dinosaur.
It was the common-sense solution consumers should have had years prior.&nbsp;
Looking to create a unique cross-device content experience? <a href="https://www.happyfuncorp.com/contact-us">Let&rsquo;s chat!&nbsp;</a>

Behind the Scenes: Bringing Disney’s Movies Anywhere Streaming Ecosystem to Life

An innovative EV charging brand is reimagining the charging experience with full-service EV centers, complete with grocery markets, lounges with restrooms and comfortable seating, carwashes, and even &ldquo;Pup Pads&rdquo; for drivers bringing their pets along for the ride.
With all these amenities, it&rsquo;s clear that the in-person user experience is a top priority for the team as they expand locations to other regions&mdash;and the digital experience is no different.
<h2>The challenge</h2>
This EV charging brand hired HFC to design, architect, and build mobile apps for iOS and Android to connect with its EV charging infrastructure and give drivers a fully integrated experience when they pull in to charge their cars.&nbsp;
Specifically, the apps needed to incorporate key functionality such as charging the car, accepting payments, and showing the user as much detail about their charging metrics as possible. Doing so required producing multilayered deliverables that involved rapid prototyping to address product edge cases, as well as the thoughtful architecture and orchestration of multiple third-party partners and APIs.
They also had a complex network of EVSPs (Electric Vehicle Service Providers, which are companies that manage and operate electric vehicle charging stations and the overall driver experience), physical charger hardware vendors, and payment processors, which required creative engineering and problem-solving to build out a cohesive, robust solution that worked with many partners.
Success required that HFC architect a foundation that would integrate these separate services into a cohesive, unified system.
HFC helped them:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Audit the existing ecosystem and determine how to integrate an app and hardware partners seamlessly into a consistent and user-friendly mobile experience</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Conduct research and analysis into the selected third-party partners (such as Apriva, which processes credit card payments, and Cybersource, which handles digital payments through mobile wallets) and validate their suitability or make alternative recommendations</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Design, build, and manage a new mobile app experience for iPhone and Android</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Design and develop the admin portal and login system, including automatically updating the portal as chargers are used</li>
</ul>
<h2>HFC&rsquo;s approach</h2>
The HFC team first considered their choice of backend API technology, ultimately deciding on GraphQL due to its key advantages over a traditional REST API. GraphQL&rsquo;s type safety ensures that data is consistently formatted with specific fields of defined types, allowing the client to confidently minimize runtime errors and reliably receive only the expected data from the server&mdash;even in the event of an app crash.&nbsp;
The team built the mobile apps in React Native, an open-source UI framework because it works for both iPhone and Android and allowed them to write code in JavaScript, which could convert to Swift&mdash;which could then be compiled for Android and iOS applications.&nbsp;
Using a single language and common framework was a deliberate choice, as it made it easier for developers to multitask between the applications. The team also went with the NextJS framework, a flavor of React that allows for server-side page generation as well as various other technical benefits.
A seamless mobile experience - The main pillar of HFC&rsquo;s deliverables was, of course, the app. The team delivered an iOS and Android app that not only allowed users to plug in and charge their cars but also highlighted how many chargers were available at a station. It came with other useful features such as location sharing, which let the app show users the nearest charging station. Families with multiple EVs could even save multiple vehicles in their account and see charging histories for each one.&nbsp;
A robust admin portal with payment processing - Beyond integrating between charging hardware and EVSPs, a key component of the app experience was the payment processor, Payter. HFC built an admin portal where users could see a recap of every charging session, which credit card was used, how much it cost, the times and what battery life they started and ended at, and so on. Transparency and clarity was key.
A carwash integration - A unique feature that HFC built was a carwash service as an add-on to the charging experience through Carwash API&mdash;EV owners could pull into a station and redeem a self-service carwash using a six-digit code from the mobile app.
A proof of concept (POC) for a custom valet experience - HFC created the UX/UI for a valet application that enabled the valet team to perform vehicle intakes and delegate different tasks as the vehicles pulled up to the on-site valet staff, optimizing for efficiency by listing tasks in priority order and allowing team members to self-assign, which would help a smaller team get more done.
Effectively, as a vehicle moved through the process, it could move from one valet to the next to have the various services completed until it was returned to the customer, who could stay informed on the vehicle's progress while they relaxed in the lounge.
<h2>The results: A revolutionary mobile experience for EV charging</h2>
From a large network of partners to an evolving set of product requirements, HFC ultimately delivered a robust and MVP&nbsp; experience and unique POCs that tested out unique functionality not found in other EV charging brands.&nbsp;
With 20 more amenity-packed charging stations planned for the future, this first-of-its-kind EV charging brand is positioned to provide a full-service and user-friendly driver experience and transform the EV charging industry.&nbsp;
Have an amazing mobile experience in mind&mdash;but need a trusted partner to architect the solution and audit your third-party providers?
<a href="https://www.happyfuncorp.com/contact-us">Let&rsquo;s chat!&nbsp;</a>

How HFC Helped an EV Charging Brand Create a Digital Experience as Thoughtful and Innovative as Its Charging Centers

In 2012, White House CTO Todd Park invited 60 education leaders from public, private, philanthropic, and government communities to answer one question: How can we use data to improve student outcomes?
Teams were asked to leverage openly available, machine readable, and interoperable datasets that could be aligned with student-level data to come up with a prototype that they could present to leaders at the White House. From there, the top ideas could be further developed through private, public, philanthropic or other channels.
One of these teams was led by Arthi Krishnaswami, an information designer and visualization expert. Her concept, a platform code-named RyeCatcher, was inspired by the experiences of special education students and its goal was to create a system that supported students in at-risk environments and their families to find the right services and intervention programs.
Arthi had a clear vision of what she wanted RyeCatcher to become, and what it needed to achieve. She just needed the right partner to help build it&mdash;in a scalable and sustainable way.
<h2>The challenge</h2>
Beyond the typical challenges that every startup faces, such as budget, resources, and time, RyeCatcher had another unique constraint: it needed to work for different states&rsquo; educational structures.&nbsp;
The other major consideration was security. It was a top priority for Arthi. &ldquo;A lot of what we capture in the platform is quite sensitive, so we needed to safely and sustainably scale in a way that protects the integrity of the data for the people who matter the most&mdash;the students,&rdquo; says Arthi.
RyeCatcher chose HFC to help them:
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Build a platform from scratch that supported students, schools, and parents in discovering and accessing services and programs</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Expand on the system with a long-term vision in mind, with features such as permissions, attendance, events, and consent systems</li>
</ul>
<table>
 <tbody>
 <tr>
 <td>
 &ldquo;When RyeCatcher came to HFC, all we had were a series of components that were part of a prototype. HFC took that and turned it into an enterprise platform that serves school communities.&rdquo; &mdash; Arthi Krishnaswami, Founder, RyeCatcher
 </td>
 </tr>
 </tbody>
</table>
<h2></h2>
<h2>HFC&rsquo;s approach</h2>
Because Arthi didn&rsquo;t have a large team, HFC stepped in to fill the gaps, providing frontend, backend, and UI/UX design services.
The team took an iterative approach, adapting and improving the software&rsquo;s functionality based on user feedback, advances in technology, sustainability, usability, and real-world requirements.

Built for the long term - What HFC originally built was relatively simple by design. There was a &ldquo;needs mapper,&rdquo; or questionnaire that parents, students, or teachers could fill out. An algorithm would then map students to different types of programs or support based on the responses to the questionnaire.
As time went on, HFC added more functionality, such as taking attendance, providing a continuous education data record year over year, and permissioning and consent for events. For example, if a student was going on a field trip, teachers could get the parents&rsquo; consent for the trip through the platform.
But even though the team took an iterative approach to building the product, they made sure to build with both security and the future in mind, from the very beginning. &ldquo;HFC incorporated, for example, SSL (Secure Sockets Layer)&mdash;which seems like a no-brainer today, but in 2013, SSL wasn&rsquo;t common in education software, even though it&rsquo;s critical for data security,&rdquo; says Arthi.

Data security - Because of the sensitive nature of the data that RyeCatcher contains, HFC designed the platform to limit the amount and types of data that get pulled into the system. For example, it does not collect any PII data or social security numbers, and any data that it contains about a student is stored in separate tables, and only identifiable by student ID. This, along with the fact that names of students are not included in the notes&mdash;only initials&mdash;makes it relatively easy to anonymize student data.
For the most sensitive data in RyeCatcher, there&rsquo;s an entirely encrypted area of the system called &ldquo;My Notes.&rdquo; Say a social worker meets with a student and has a sensitive conversation with them that requires follow-up and verification. In RyeCatcher, the social worker can simply write, &ldquo;Student had a sensitive conversation with me in class today, will talk to parent to understand more,&rdquo; and write a personal memory aid with more details about what was said in the &ldquo;My Notes&rdquo; feature. What&rsquo;s unique about &ldquo;My Notes&rdquo; is that it is fully encrypted, even for everyone at RyeCatcher&mdash;the only way they can tell that this feature is being used is because they pay for the data storage. &ldquo;HFC has helped us build this tiered privacy architecture to make sure that we don't ever compromise student data, even unintentionally,&rdquo; says Arthi.

A specialized AI insights engine (in progress) - One of the most exciting features that HFC is building into RyeCatcher is an AI engine that&rsquo;s trained specifically on RyeCatcher&rsquo;s needs mapper data over the last 10 years.&nbsp; This will allow caseworkers to ask questions like, &ldquo;What's the most common type of note?&rdquo; and &ldquo;What are the age ranges where certain types of behaviors happen?&rdquo; and help them as they work with students with a wide range of different needs.

Technical elements - In the very beginning, to make RyeCatcher&rsquo;s stack as modern and efficient as possible&mdash;with limited resources&mdash;HFC built the APIs using Ruby on Rails and developed the frontend with an Angular tech stack. This combination facilitated the loading of large data sets into the user interface effectively.
Fast forward five years, and RyeCatcher&rsquo;s stack needed to evolve. Due to limited budget, HFC containerized the stack to ensure consistent environments, simplify deployment, and improve scalability and maintenance. This approach helped RyeCatcher avoid expensive upgrades while still being able to deploy the necessary updates.
<table>
 <tbody>
 <tr>
 <td>
 &ldquo;HFC really thinks ahead to make sure the software will work long term. It may take a bit more work in the beginning, but 10 years later, your tech will still be running.&rdquo; &mdash; Arthi Krishnaswami, Founder, RyeCatcher
 </td>
 </tr>
 </tbody>
</table>
<h2></h2>
<h2>The results: A platform that&rsquo;s &ldquo;changed the way schools operate&rdquo;</h2>
Since its original launch in the 2014&ndash;15 school year, in schools across four states, RyeCatcher now provides tools to support the full ecosystem of school professionals and social workers using the platform.&nbsp;
HFC designed and developed an identity and access management architecture for the platform with permissions for 11 types of users&mdash;the only one of its kind&mdash;designed to solve for the complexity of in- and out-of-school providers, and the strict data privacy requirements for this environment.
&ldquo;There are other similar products today, but none that do it as comprehensively as what HFC has built,&rdquo; says Arthi. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s changed the way schools operate, and built a new standardized way for how teachers and parents should be thinking and communicating with each other in terms of sprint, growth, and feedback.&rdquo;
Just a few of the outcomes of RyeCatcher&rsquo;s partnership with HFC:
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">A platform that annually serves over 2,000 users, 16,000 students, and 38 schools</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">An estimated 4&ndash;6 hours saved per week for 47% of pilot users</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">A platform that makes it easier to coordinate programs and services on behalf of students, facilitates communication between parents and teachers, and improves school team responsiveness</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Successfully patented RyeCatcher in the US, Singapore, and Canada (a rare feat for software)</li>
</ul>
What began as a prototype in response to the task set out by the White House has, after many years of user research and refinement, evolved into a platform that&rsquo;s used by schools today to create a community of support for every student.
RyeCatcher has just celebrated its 10-year anniversary and with an eye to the future, Arthi is looking to scale up, bringing RyeCatcher to schools across more states in order to provide students with the services and support systems they need to succeed.
<a href="https://www.happyfuncorp.com/contact-us">Looking to build social innovation products with complex privacy and data handling requirements?</a>

Ryecatcher: From White House Datapalooza to Creating the Student Support System of the Future

As one of the largest home goods brands in the world, this company had a considerable amount of customers, revenue, and international business.
But it was facing a significant challenge with its online experience.
<h2>The challenge</h2>
Even though it had an e-commerce website, it didn&rsquo;t have standardized code&mdash;specifically, for two major parts of the business: its online checkout and in-store sales experience.&nbsp;
With the majority of the company&rsquo;s revenue coming from in-store design-related sales, the lack of a standardized code base was making it difficult for its development team, both in terms of pushing new features and maintenance.&nbsp;
The client chose HFC to help:
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Improve its cart and checkout experience</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Architect an improved release process</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Rebuild its code base in a more streamlined way to minimize repetitive work and human error</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Support its in-house front-end and back-end team with embedded HFC team members to quarterback projects and drive strategy</li>
</ul>
The company&rsquo;s consumer-facing online store is a website where customers can browse products and place online orders, whereas the in-store design application is what its associates use to place orders for customers in its brick-and-mortar stores while providing a white-glove &ldquo;work with a designer&rdquo; experience.
Although the code for both the online store and in-store design application started off at the same point, it had deviated over the years. This resulted in several problems.&nbsp;
There were often bugs that were fixed in one version but not in another. Features and functionality were lost if they weren&rsquo;t pushed for both the consumer-facing online store and in-store design application. And even if a team fixed multiple bugs, it could be wiped out entirely when it got to the development branch, which caused the QA and development team to have to do extra work.&nbsp;
<h2>HFC&rsquo;s approach</h2>
After years of this approach, the company approached HFC to modernize and improve its user experience in earnest.&nbsp;
When HFC came in, the team assessed the situation and took a holistic approach to the challenge:
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Start with a detailed audit including research, interviews with the client&rsquo;s team leads, and analysis of the existing code.</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Break releases down into smaller, more digestible components.</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Standardize the architecture by deduplicating and carefully merging together the code that had deviated previously, and using QA regression tests to ensure that no functionality was lost in the transition.</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Design a process that empowered the client&rsquo;s team to properly build components, feature-flag bugs or issues, and roll out features in a more systematic way.</li>
</ul>
&ldquo;We needed to help the client standardize things because they were essentially paying a tax on every feature they were developing."
&ndash; Jonathan Zaleski, Director of Technical Architecture, HFC
<h2>The results:</h2>
To bring things back to basics and create standardized code across the client&rsquo;s in-store design application and consumer-facing online cart and checkout experience, HFC helped the client&rsquo;s development team implement industry best practices and designed a process that empowered them to:
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Faster, more predictable code releases due to the team not having to constantly re-implement functionality that was lost during merge processes</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">75% of previous copy-and-paste code eliminated thanks to a new combined code base</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">One version, compared to seven or eight different versions of previous code requiring maintenance</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">A broad cultural shift as a result of the impact of the partnership with HFC, with client team members proposing more user-oriented solutions that improve the shopping experience for customers</li>
</ul>
By being able to provide support with delivery transformation, organization, and optimization HFC was able to help this leading home goods brand streamline its complex release process and dramatically improve efficiency across the board for its engineering team.
With this project and other similar projects in the works, the client&mdash;and its code base&mdash;are&nbsp; now set up for continued worldwide growth and success.
Want to improve your e-commerce experience and increase sales, while reducing the burden on your in-house team?&nbsp;
<a href="https://www.happyfuncorp.com/contact-us" title="Contact Us Form">Let&rsquo;s chat!</a>

As one of the largest home goods brands in the world, this company had a considerable amount of customers, revenue, and international business.

How This Leading Home Furnishings Purveyor Reduced Repetitive Work for Its Team by 75% by Streamlining Its Release Process

A popular premium audio storytelling brand, Audible gives users access to a vast library of audiobooks, podcasts, and original content through a subscription-based model. For its marketing team, reaching new audiences and listeners is a major goal&mdash;a connection that, unsurprisingly for a digital content company, mostly happens on its website.
<h2>The challenge</h2>
Audible had a problem. Its previous CMS (content management system), Movable Type, was difficult for its marketing team to use. Even making basic changes to a web page required technical knowledge or developer support.

That meant that even though its marketers had amazing creative ideas for reaching new customers through blogs, landing pages, and other content channels, they couldn&rsquo;t execute on those ideas quickly or easily.

Audible chose HFC to help them:

<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Assess whether a new CMS was a better fit for their goals and content requirements&nbsp;</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Empower their team to turn their blog properties into more robust marketing funnels</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Optimize the blog for organic search by improving load speeds, Core Web Vitals performance, and Lighthouse scores, while ensuring Audible&rsquo;s team could build beautiful pages without developer support</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Migrate all their blogs to a new modern platform with consistent layouts and content types.</li>
</ul>

<table>
 <tbody>
 <tr>
 <td>
 &ldquo;HFC has enabled us to migrate content, create new blogs faster, and grow the space to be truly global to meet the needs of these new markets&rdquo; &ndash; Nate Cook, Director of Global Marketing Web Development
 </td>
 </tr>
 </tbody>
</table>
<h2>HFC&rsquo;s approach</h2>
Taking a comprehensive view of Audible&rsquo;s requirements and the team&rsquo;s pain points, HFC jumped in with the aim to get Audible set up on a new content management platform that gives its creative teams more autonomy and the structure to build and create content with minimal external support.

Rethinking the architecture - HFC&rsquo;s blog CMS strategy for Audible had two main pillars: Contentful CMS and the Next.js framework.
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Contentful provides an easy-to-use way to structure and manage content, and exposes an API (REST|GraphQL) that is automatically updated based on the content structure.</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Next.js would give Audible&rsquo;s team a more customizable way of building static pages that provides blazing fast experiences. HFC chose Next.js because it can be connected easily to the Contentful API, which lets designers and developers customize content freely using React components.</li>
</ul>
<table>
 <tbody>
 <tr>
 <td>
 &ldquo;The Contentful migration was the best thing that ever happened to all of the editors and once we were on there, people raved about it. It's very self-explanatory and easy to use.&rdquo; &ndash; Nate Cook, Director of Global Marketing and Web Development
 </td>
 </tr>
 </tbody>
</table>

Setup - HFC built out all the elements that Audible&rsquo;s creative and marketing teams would need, so they could customize the front-end of the blog however they liked without needing to code anything.&nbsp;

<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">For example, HFC built custom apps within Contentful that integrate with the Audible API so editors could easily pull in elements like cover images, titles, authors, and so on. All they have to do is paste in the unique identifier for that title in the marketplace&mdash;this saved the editors 10x the time it would&rsquo;ve taken to pull hundreds of books into a single blog&mdash;and made their team very happy.</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">HFC also created a more straightforward CI/CD workflow for Audible using ACS and Fargate AWS services, which would allow the setup to be cloned easily in the future</li>
</ul>
Migration - After building Audible&rsquo;s European and global blog structure on Contentful, HFC is now migrating all the blogs to this structure for consistency.
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">With this migration, HFC is refactoring the front-end pieces on the US and global blogs &ndash; cleaning up the European migration while migrating the US blogs</li>
</ul>
Streamlining - Audible has seven different blogs, each managed differently by its team of roughly 50 editors. HFC is streamlining every blog to be built on the same platform with the same structure so they can be updated and managed more efficiently, and have the same structure and SEO capabilities.&nbsp;

Another major pain point for Audible&rsquo;s team is they have two code repositories to support the US and Europe regions, which HFC is also helping to consolidate.

Design - After given some initial requirements, HFC architected, designed, and implemented Audible&rsquo;s instance of Contentful, which can now support a recent brand refresh, continued SEO growth, and seven global blog properties (and counting).

Ongoing optimizations - Next steps: optimize the blog for accessibility, translations, and continuous Core Web Vitals and other performance improvements.
<h2>The results: A CMS that empowers creative teams to tell more stories&mdash;while saving editors 10x the time</h2>
Now, all of Audible&rsquo;s blogs are on one modern tech stack and have a cohesive brand look thanks to consistent layouts and content types.
With the standardized and optimized content and visual layouts that HFC built, Audible&rsquo;s team can easily populate and configure content, which also results in a much more predictable look across the blog.
With Contentful, they no longer need to create APIs and Audible&rsquo;s technical team doesn&rsquo;t need to create or maintain any blog management dashboards.
Just a few of the outcomes of Audible&rsquo;s partnership with HFC:
<ul>
 <li>20% increase in conversion rates</li>
 <li aria-level="1">Hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual purchases</li>
 <li aria-level="1">7 regional blogs launched for the US, UK, France, Canada, French Canada, Italy, and Spain</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Increased agility and ease of use for editors</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">7 million page views across global blogs in 2023</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">A brand-new Jira ticketing system and process that improved the team&rsquo;s ability to plan, track velocity, and work in a more agile way</li>
</ul>

With a new CMS and structure, HFC has given Audible the tools the team needs to create new content and campaigns, while reducing the burden on their development team. Now, Audible is set to launch their next blog, Australia, with the updated backend and tools that HFC built.

Their editors now have the support they need to easily publish engaging content on the blog, optimize pages to rank in search engines, and maintain a consistent brand with prebuilt templates.
<a href="https://www.happyfuncorp.com/contact-us" title="Contact US">Need help with improving your online content strategy?</a>

How Audible Unified 7 Global Blog Properties Into a New User-Friendly CMS With HFC’s Help

In 2016, X (then known as Twitter) made a bold move into live sports streaming by securing the rights to NFL&rsquo;s Thursday Night Football. It was a pivotal step in their strategy to expand beyond mobile and web, combining real-time conversation and live football.&nbsp;
While Twitter focused on its web and mobile experiences, they partnered with HFC to design, develop, and launch their over-the-top (OTT) apps for Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Android TV&mdash;on an ambitious 12-week timeline.
<h2>The challenge</h2>
Twitter was facing multiple obstacles in its push to become a premier live streaming platform on TV-based devices, primarily:
A race against time With only three months before the NFL season kicked off, Twitter needed to rapidly design, develop, and launch applications across multiple OTT hardware. Missing the deadline would have jeopardized their streaming rights with the NFL and derailed their entrance into live sports broadcasting.
Building amid moving parts Key backend systems and data services were still evolving, and the new apps needed to be built in parallel with these components&mdash;and ready to integrate seamlessly when the APIs went live.
Creating a unified experience across platforms Each TV platform&mdash;Apple TV (tvOS), Amazon Fire TV, and Android TV&mdash;had its own unique requirements and development ecosystems. Twitter needed a cohesive user experience across all of these platforms while maintaining the performance and technical standards.
Twitter chose HFC to help them:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Lead the end-to-end effort to design, develop, and deploy Twitter&rsquo;s live streaming apps across Apple TV, Roku, Fire TV, and Android TV on a 12-week deadline.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Complete new front-end applications that could integrate with Twitter&rsquo;s backend services once they were ready, ensuring a seamless transition to live data and streaming.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Create an engaging user experience that combines live video with real-time social interaction, leveraging Twitter&rsquo;s strengths in community engagement.</li>
</ul>
<h2>The approach</h2>
HFC assembled a focused, cross-functional team&mdash;including a product manager, designer, QA, and up to five developers at peak&mdash;to shepherd the project from kickoff to launch. The goal wasn&rsquo;t just to build quickly, but to ensure a smooth, coordinated delivery across all fronts. The team worked closely with Twitter&rsquo;s internal teams to align on vision and execution while taking the lead on day-to-day development and delivery.
Parallel development of frontend and backend With the backend APIs still under development, HFC designed and implemented placeholder hooks in the front-end applications. This allowed the apps to be built and tested independently, and once the APIs were ready, they were seamlessly integrated without major additional work.
Platform-specific optimizations HFC developed each app natively, using Swift for Apple TV (tvOS), Java and the Android SDK for Fire TV and Android TV, and Brightscript for Roku. Each platform required unique optimizations while maintaining a consistent Twitter experience.
Expanding feature set post-launch Following the successful launch in September 2016, HFC continued to iterate on the app, building additional features&mdash;including the ability to send live tweets from a mobile device to the TV for an Apple keynote event demo just two months after launch.
<h2>The results</h2>
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Successful on-time launch: Twitter for Apple TV, Roku, Fire TV, and Android TV launched in September 2016 to positive press and customer reception, securing Twitter&rsquo;s place in live sports streaming.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Industry recognition: Apple named Twitter for Apple TV <a href="https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2016/12/apple-unveils-best-of-2016-across-apps-music-movies-and-more.html">App of the Year for 2016</a>.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Massive reach: The initiative allowed 800 million registered and unregistered users to access Thursday Night Football games on multiple devices, marking a first in digital sports streaming.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Sustained impact: HFC continued to support Twitter&rsquo;s OTT platform for two years, iterating on features and expanding capabilities until the project was brought in-house.</li>
</ul>
Twitter&rsquo;s foray into live sports streaming was a landmark moment in social media and sports broadcasting. By successfully bringing TNF to TV-based platforms, HFC helped Twitter bridge the gap between live events and social conversation on the biggest screen in the house.
Need to launch a digital product on a tight timeline? <a href="https://www.happyfuncorp.com/contact-us">Let&rsquo;s talk.</a>

From Social Feeds to the Screen: Launching X’s Live Streaming Experience on TV Platforms

Perhaps the most globally recognizable name in coworking spaces, WeWork built its business primarily on long-term rentals in its early years.
But this membership model required significant investment and commitment upfront, and WeWork&rsquo;s team wanted to branch into a new target market and attract a more diverse customer base.
They had a vision for a new kind of WeWork space that would allow workers&mdash;especially freelancers, travelers, and early-stage startups&mdash;to engage with the brand on a more flexible, shorter-term basis.
That concept was WeWork Now.
<h2>The challenge</h2>
Originally branded as MadeByWe, WeWork Now was a vision of a flagship store that was part caf&eacute;, part design goods shop, and of course, part rental space for coworking. It would be open to everyone and right in the center of Manhattan in the bustling Flatiron neighborhood.
But besides building out the physical space, WeWork&rsquo;s Retail Expansion team also wanted to create an e-commerce platform for WeWork Now that would showcase the direct-to-consumer brands and products that were WeWork customers. This would act as an additional retail channel for those members&mdash;a perk for being part of the WeWork ecosystem.
To design and deliver this platform, including everything from core functionality to new integrations, WeWork brought in HFC.
WeWork chose HFC to help them:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Build a mobile app reservation system to allow workers to book meetings rooms and desk space</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Develop a prototype and launch the production 1.0 version of WeWork Now&rsquo;s e-commerce platform</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Develop a new sitemap for WeWork&rsquo;s website</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Design responsive layouts and page components</li>
</ul>
<h2>HFC&rsquo;s approach</h2>
HFC worked closely with the WeWork team, both providing technology leadership and back- and front-end engineering for the software that would power the platform. HFC was also responsible for the architecture and scalability of the system, ensuring it could support WeWork&rsquo;s growth and evolving business needs.
To build a reliable, easy-to-use, and aesthetically pleasing e-commerce platform for WeWork Now, HFC:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Leveraged the Shopify ecosystem as the foundation</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Designed and structured product, brand, static, and landing pages to enhance both usability and visual appeal</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Enabled seamless product purchasing for customers</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Provided admins with the ability to:</li>
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="2">Track orders and analyze key metrics</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="2">Add new products and brands without technical help</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="2">Edit and manage product descriptions, landing page content, and pricing easily</li>
</ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Built integrations with external 3PL and fulfillment systems</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Connected the system with analytics and support tools from the Shopify app ecosystem, including live chat, drip email campaigns, and retargeting tools</li>
</ul>
<h2>The result: A seamless digital extension of WeWork&rsquo;s physical spaces</h2>
Over the course of six short months, HFC had created a completely custom e-commerce platform for WeWork Now, with nearly 100 bookable workplace seats available on-demand or through pre-booking via the website.
Guests could drop in, buy a flat white at the Bluestone Lane counter, then use the responsive web app to reserve a spot in the expertly designed workspace at the back. At the same time, WeWork staff could manage check-ins and monitor guest flow and availability using the native iOS app.
WeWork Now was an innovative demonstration of how to blend digital and physical experiences for both guests and staff. It highlighted a visionary shift in how we think about coworking spaces&mdash;and more importantly, how we can engage with users and build more varied customer relationships that align to the growing demand for flexibility, convenience, and personalization.
Want to create a mobile or digital experience that seamlessly integrates with physical environments? <a href="https://www.happyfuncorp.com/contact-us">Let&rsquo;s chat!</a>

Blending Retail, Hospitality, and Coworking: How We Brought WeWork Now to Life

In 2014, Andy Hunter and Elizabeth Koch founded Catapult with a vision to create a book publishing platform that championed fresh, diverse voices. Within a few years, they had established themselves as a powerhouse in the literary space&mdash;releasing award-winning books, reviving an independent press, launching a digital magazine, and building a global writing education program.
As Catapult&rsquo;s digital presence grew, they needed a custom-built platform to showcase their literary magazine, foster a community of writers, and streamline their growing online writing classes. They turned to HFC to bring this vision to life.
<h2>The challenge</h2>
As they were planning out a new, cohesive digital ecosystem, Catapult had to consider several obstacles and requirements:
Limitations of existing platforms. Off-the-shelf solutions like WordPress just didn&rsquo;t have the flexibility to support Catapult&rsquo;s vision for a dynamic online literary magazine and community space. They needed a custom-built platform that could serve both professional editorial content and user-generated stories with a seamless user experience.
The need for one seamless space for books, classes, and editorial content. As Catapult&rsquo;s brand and offerings grew, they needed a unified platform that could not only house their editorial content but also integrate their writing classes and book sales in a way that felt natural to users.
An online learning experience built for writers. Catapult&rsquo;s team had experimented with using generic tools like Google Docs and Zoom to host online workshops, but this approach wasn&rsquo;t ideal and created friction for both students and instructors. They needed a purpose-built online learning environment designed specifically for writing workshops, enabling inline feedback, real-time discussions, and seamless video integration.
Catapult chose HFC to help them:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Design and build a digital magazine and community space that supported a bustling editorial team while offering an intuitive publishing experience.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Develop a custom online learning platform that addressed the limitations of existing tools and provided a rich, engaging space for writing workshops.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Expand Catapult&rsquo;s digital course offerings by designing a scalable class structure, refining enrollment flows, and enhancing user engagement through better UX.</li>
</ul>
<h2>The approach</h2>
HFC took a two-pronged approach, focusing on both the editorial and educational experience.
<ol>
<li> Catapult 2.0: A reimagined digital magazine</li>
</ol>
The first phase of the engagement involved a major redesign of Catapult&rsquo;s digital presence. HFC built a custom content management system with a WYSIWYG (&ldquo;what you see if what you get&rdquo;) editor that streamlined content workflows while providing an elegant front-end experience. To ensure Catapult&rsquo;s digital platform met the needs of both its editorial team and its growing writing community, HFC focused on three key areas:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Editorial and community balance. HFC developed a custom publishing platform that empowered Catapult&rsquo;s editorial team to create professionally curated content while also making it easy for their community to edit their own stories and add supporting images. The 1.0 version of this platform launched in fall 2015, and HFC&rsquo;s team used the learnings and feedback to iterate on a 2.0 release in 2016.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Design system thinking. A flexible, component-based design allowed for consistent execution across different sections of the site while maintaining unique visual identities for the professionally written pieces versus the more user-driven content side of the community.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Responsive storytelling. The site was built with a mobile-first approach, ensuring readability and usability across all devices.</li>
</ul>
<ol start="2">
<li> Revolutionizing online writing classes</li>
</ol>
Recognizing the shortcomings of existing online class platforms, HFC designed and built a custom learning experience that was tailored to the needs of writers:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Inline commenting for workshops. Students and instructors could provide contextual feedback directly on submitted pieces, which improved the revision process. HFC integrated the commenting UI into a clean, minimal writing experience&mdash;and comments could even be filtered to streamline the feedback process (for example, focusing on the instructor&rsquo;s comments or specific participants&rsquo; feedback).&nbsp;</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Integrated live sessions. HFC developed a virtual writing salon with a custom video call interface that allowed students to engage in real-time discussions without switching between multiple tools, and that supported larger call sizes while maintaining good call quality. The team also built out a feature where users could see the live call and access call controls in a popover window, but reclaim most of their screen space for text editing.&nbsp;</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">An improved enrollment process. The new platform introduced an apply-first, pay-later model, making it easier for students to explore courses before committing financially.</li>
</ul>
As the program grew, HFC conducted user research through surveys and interviews to refine the course offerings. One major insight was that longer, high-ticket classes filled just as well as shorter ones, leading to a strategic shift in Catapult&rsquo;s course catalog.
<h2>The results</h2>
After the initial launch, HFC continued iterating based on user feedback, experimenting with new landing pages to improve Catapult&rsquo;s visibility in search engines and advertising with AdWords.&nbsp;
The most important insight came from examining ROAS (return on ad spend): While moderate-length classes filled at a reasonable cost, the team discovered that the more experimental, lengthier classes were filling at similar levels&mdash;with much higher price tags. HFC recommended offering more of these classes in the 2018 course calendar as a top priority to meet Catapult&rsquo;s 100% year-over-year growth goal.&nbsp;
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">100% YoY growth. The online program grew to hundreds of sessions and millions in revenue per year. By optimizing course offerings and refining marketing strategies, HFC helped Catapult meet its ambitious revenue goals well ahead of schedule.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">A thriving digital magazine. The new Catapult platform provided an engaging home for editorial content and user-generated stories, enhancing community participation.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">A best-in-class online writing school. With a seamless UX and features tailored to writers, Catapult&rsquo;s online classes scaled up significantly, with hundreds of course offerings.</li>
</ul>
By building a digital ecosystem tailored to both editorial and educational needs, HFC helped Catapult cement its place as a leader in the literary world.
 Looking to build a custom digital platform that grows with your business? <a href="https://www.happyfuncorp.com/contact-us">Let&rsquo;s talk.&nbsp;</a>

From the Page to the Digital Stage: Building Catapult’s Online Magazine and Writing Community

Lennar isn&rsquo;t just a home construction building company. As of 2023, the company was the second largest home construction company in the United States based on the number of homes sold.
From single family detached houses to condominiums and townhouses, Lennar builds a variety of different types of homes for both today&rsquo;s and future generations.&nbsp;
What was unique about Lennar was that the team wasn&rsquo;t simply looking for a product engineering firm to build an app or give its website an overhaul&mdash;they were in the midst of evolving their operation to take on a product mindset. The goal: to work more efficiently and gather better data throughout the homebuilding process.
With its recent growth and success, Lennar was hitting a tipping point, and needed an operational platform that provided real-time data and made day-to-day tasks for the team.
<h2>The challenge</h2>
The team was contending with outdated technology and manual processes, which not only impeded their work, but also made it difficult from an enterprise planning standpoint to understand where and how the company&rsquo;s resources were being used.&nbsp;
To better manage their data and reduce dependencies on offline processes, they decided to embark on a transformation of their approach to technology and data management at the firm.
The task for HFC? To build this new MVP, which could act as a template for the broader organization and also support Lennar&rsquo;s team in transitioning to a more product-led organization that focused on building and delivering products that focus on value and acted as a primary driver of growth.
Lennar chose HFC to help them:
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Pull all required data out of its many existing sources so that it could be incorporated into a new, unified system.</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Design and build HomebuilderOS, a scalable operations platform on top of Lennar&rsquo;s legacy backend systems (like their ERP, project management platform, and CRM).</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Develop a product-led approach for the organization that would help its team transition away from paper-based to digital workflows.</li>
</ul>
<h2>HFC&rsquo;s approach</h2>
This project featured multiple stakeholders, objectives, and deliverables. From a technical, design, and strategic perspective, HFC&rsquo;s team identified a few challenges that would be key to achieving the results that Lennar&rsquo;s team wanted.
For this partnership to be successful, some of Lennar&rsquo;s existing systems and tools had to be modernized first. HFC would also have to embed a team of specialists to work closely with Lennar&rsquo;s in-house experts and stakeholders, while managing the experience design side of the project.
Close collaboration with internal and external stakeholders - Lennar was being advised by EY (Ernst &amp; Young) through this modernization process, and HFC partnered with stakeholders from both groups throughout the project to ensure their collective vision was being translated into reality.
Embedded teams - HFC assembled a team of full-stack engineers, designers, front-end engineers, and QA specialists.
Data gathering - To lay the foundation for the rest of the project, HFC worked with Lennar&rsquo;s internal team to pull all the required data out of existing sources in an organized way so that it could be implemented into the new system being built. This was a challenge because many of the existing legacy tools, such as Oracle, were not easy to integrate with or update.
Design and build - The key deliverable was a new internal-facing platform: HomebuilderOS. HFC designed and built a robust web application on Azure, leveraging serverless JS functions, a GraphQL API, MSSQL database, and ReactJS frontend as key components.
<h2>The results: A new platform that formed the bedrock for a company-wide digital transformation</h2>
Now that the company had new systems in place to manage data in real-time, the organizations could transition away from paper, spreadsheet, and access-based workflows.&nbsp;
Lennar&rsquo;s coordinators, finance, and concierge associates teams could now log in through a modern and dynamic online experience and easily access up-to-date data that was relevant to their roles by filtering by person, role, department, or region.
Just a few of the outcomes of Lennar&rsquo;s partnership with HFC:
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">A successful digital transformation that powered the transition to a product-led organization, with new standardized operations and procedures</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">HomebuilderOS launched in three regions nationwide, setting the stage for the team to scale up and roll out to an additional 40 regions&nbsp;</li>
</ul>
Beyond improving quantifiable metrics like conversion rates and time saved, Lennar&rsquo;s partnership with HFC proved out the intangible benefits of digital transformation and how improving the technology and tools can make day-to-day work easier for a team.
Their global team is now able to easily access the data they need, and with HomebuilderOS, they have made significant progress and are set up for continued success on their digital transformation journey.
<a href="https://www.happyfuncorp.com/contact-us">Want to evolve your business with digital products that enable real-time collaboration and data sharing?</a>

Supercharging Operational Efficiency: How This Home Construction Company Replaced Its Legacy System With a New Operations Platform

Andy Hunter, co-founder of Electric Literature and LitHub, had an ambitious goal: he wanted to help independent bookstores succeed&mdash;and disrupt a world that&rsquo;s dominated by Amazon.&nbsp;
He believed that if he could take even 1% from Amazon's online book sales and redirect the bulk of those profits to indie bookstores, he could not only create an important lifeline for those businesses, but also give them some exposure that they may not have the funds or technical skills to create for themselves.
He envisioned an online retailer that collaborates with independent bookstores to distribute profits directly to them. So, Bookshop.org was born.
<h2>The challenge</h2>
Bookshop.org had a major challenge: it was going up against a titan in not just the bookselling industry, but all of e-commerce: Amazon.
Andy knew that for Bookshop.org to stand a chance, it needed a flawless online experience&mdash;and a partner that could provide branding, design, and in particular, engineering expertise, to bring that vision to life.&nbsp;
Everything hinged on the website, and it was critical that the system could connect with suppliers to get an inventory of books, send the orders generated on Bookshop.org to the supplier to fulfill them, and finally ship those titles to customers&mdash;just to name a few.
It was a tall order.
<h3>Bookshop.org chose HFC to help them:</h3>

<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Create an online destination that lets book lovers browse and find their favorite books</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Build a tight integration that could ingest millions of products from Ingram, their primary book data and order fulfillment platform, and the largest book distributor in the US</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Design a referral system that lets local bookstores put up a page on Bookshop.org (that they can send customers to and earn commission checks from) and track where customers come from so the Bookshop.org team can calculate what they owe their bookstore partners at the end of every month</li>
</ul>
<h2>HFC&rsquo;s approach</h2>
Deploying a highly specialized team, HFC set out to build a digital experience for Bookshop.org that could take on one of the biggest online book sellers in the world.

Little did they know that soon, everyone would be buying books online because of the pandemic. In just a few short weeks, customers would no longer be able to step foot into bookstores, which were faced with closure&mdash;unless they could come up with a creative solution.&nbsp;
But because HFC built a flexible and scalable system right from the get-go, that meant Bookshop.org was perfectly positioned to take online orders from thousands of local bookstores around the country and pay them a cut of the sales to keep their businesses going.&nbsp;
<h3>The approach HFC took to create a resilient platform that could support Bookshop.org&rsquo;s huge unexpected opportunity:</h3>

Website - HFC built the new website on Solidus, a customizable Ruby on Rails platform, because it provided the best balance between out-of-the-box functionality, customizability, and cost.
Due to Bookshop.org&rsquo;s unique demands, HFC significantly customized Solidus (which typically caters to smaller ecommerce websites) to be able to manage high traffic volumes&mdash;and over two million unique SKUs&mdash;effectively.
Partners - One of the biggest technical challenges in this project was making sure Bookshop.org&rsquo;s website connected with Ingram, a book data and order fulfillment platform and a leading distributor in the industry.&nbsp;
But Ingram&rsquo;s infrastructure is more suited to physical bookstore operations, lacking the real-time capabilities that are essential for ecommerce. To bridge this gap, HFC developed a system that made it possible to manage this extensive inventory and order data far more easily.
Ingram also used to send detailed order updates later in the day or days after, which wasn&rsquo;t ideal in a world where customers expect next-day or even same-day delivery. So, HFC designed an automation so that every order update now triggered a series of preset tasks, which sped up the order and fulfillment process.&nbsp;
Other than automated handling of fulfillment, HFC also created customizations in the Solidus dashboard to show detailed Ingram-specific order/line item status codes and their meanings. This helped the customer service team quickly understand the status of the order and take necessary actions.
Integrations - Besides Ingram, HFC also built other custom integrations specifically tailored to Bookshop.org&rsquo;s team&rsquo;s daily workflows and processes, including:&nbsp;
 
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Stripe Connect, a marketplace payout platform</li>
</ul>
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Google Analytics to track website performance</li>
</ul>
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Mailchimp to capture and segment customers for emails</li>
</ul>
<h2>The result: An online bookshop with infrastructure that could rival Amazon</h2>
Bookshop.org came to HFC as a pitch deck, and in just six months, launched in the market&mdash;right as the COVID-19 pandemic was about to hit.
With the world going into lockdown, Bookshop.org saw an explosion of traffic and sales that no one could anticipate&mdash;and that could&rsquo;ve been catastrophic for a website that wasn&rsquo;t designed for scale and resiliency.&nbsp;
But due to the preparedness and optimizations by HFC, Bookshop.org was resilient and performant right from the start, even with the massive spikes in traffic and sales&mdash;an impressive feat because most high-traffic applications require months or even years of trial and error to achieve stability.&nbsp;
<h3>Just a few of the outcomes of Bookshop.org&rsquo;s partnership with HFC:</h3>
<ul>
 <li>$65 million in revenue in the business&rsquo; first year</li>
 <li aria-level="1">Over $30 million contributed to independent booksellers since its inception in 2020</li>
 <li aria-level="1">Hundreds of millions in gross sales in the last four years</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">A website that could support 2 million visitors monthly</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Affiliate partnerships with publishers such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Buzzfeed&nbsp;</li>
</ul>
But more importantly, Bookshop.org was also able to serve as a lifeline for independent bookstores, especially during the unforeseen challenges brought about by COVID-19. With huge revenue figures, substantial contributions to independent booksellers, and a sustainable business model that channels the majority&mdash;about 80%!&mdash;of profits back to local bookstores, Bookshop.org exemplifies how a mission-driven approach to e-commerce can be successful while benefiting the wider community.
&ldquo;This is the smoothest launch I've ever had.&rdquo;
&ndash; Andy Hunter, CEO
 Need help building a highly customized online platform to support your unique business model?
&nbsp;<a href="https://www.happyfuncorp.com/contact-us">Let&rsquo;s chat!</a>

Bookshop sells books online to help indie bookstores IRL

How This Online Bookshop Took on One of the Biggest Booksellers in the World—and Did $65 Million in Revenue in Its First Year

Most people know Samsung as a brand that makes appliances and devices like TVs, laundry machines, smartwatches, and smartphones.
Today, many of Samsung&rsquo;s devices (like the very cool <a href="https://news.samsung.com/us/experts-explore-ai-wearable-tech-revolutionizing-sleep-health-sxsw-world-samsung-sleep-day-2024/">Galaxy Ring</a>) are part of a connected ecosystem of products and services aimed at improving consumers&rsquo; health. For example, it has a wearables and smartphone lineup that uses data about users&rsquo; habits and physical activity to track progress and help them live a healthier lifestyle.&nbsp;
In 2020, Samsung was poised to officially launch a new initiative: Samsung Health.
<h2>The challenge</h2>
Samsung needed a partner to help it work with a selection of fitness studios to expand its digital footprint by creating tailored apps using third party content&mdash;Samsung Health was going to be on not only Samsung&rsquo;s Smart TVs, but also the entire Samsung device ecosystem (similar to Apple&rsquo;s health app).
Samsung recommended HFC as a partner for these fitness studios, each of which had its own unique content and brand positioning. The goal was twofold: attract fitness partners to build their own apps on Samsung&rsquo;s Smart TV platform; and set up Samsung's own integrated health app, which leverages content from those providers.
Even though some of these partners had iOS or Android apps, this would be the first time creating an OTT app (&ldquo;over the top&rdquo;; a media service offered directly to viewers over the Internet&mdash;no cable needed) for all of them. Samsung Health chose HFC to help them stitch together a new OTT experience for these studios with customized front end apps specifically for the Samsung Smart TVs.
<h2>HFC&rsquo;s approach</h2>
The team combined HFC&rsquo;s expertise in TV-based experiences with the unique value-adds of Samsung Health to design and build individual experiences that felt just right for each individual brand.&nbsp;
To maximize speed and compatibility with other technologies in these companies&rsquo; tech stacks, they leveraged the Tizen OS&rsquo; Web Development framework to build ReactJS-based apps for these Samsung partners:
Ob&eacute;, a digital-first startup and neighbor of HFC&rsquo;s in Brooklyn that offers a limited catalog of free content on Tizen that viewers can try out and even have their workouts tracked in the Samsung Health app, as a no-risk lead-in to the full Ob&eacute; offering.&nbsp;
Barre3, which has a network of physical studios around the world as well as a digital offering, opted for near-parity with their web experience, which gives existing subscribers access to its full content catalog. Users can also track workouts both in Samsung Health and across other Barre3 digital touchpoints as well.
Echelon, a digital-first streaming company and connected fitness machine company, launched an experience primarily aimed at existing subscribers. Although this experience initially didn&rsquo;t have an integration to their workout bikes, it did come with a limited selection of free content as well as workouts that didn&rsquo;t require connected equipment. In 2023, we helped Echelon launch Bluetooth pairing with connected equipment.
Each app logs activity to Samsung Health as well as user and video playback behavior.
<h2>The result: A revolutionary way to bring the fitness studio into living rooms across the country</h2>
Ultimately, HFC developed three out of the five Tizen partnership apps that were included in Samsung Smart TVs&rsquo; Health app, creating a seamless digital experience for all of their partners and stakeholders, including customers, builders, and designers.&nbsp;
Not only did HFC work with Samsung Health and its partners to significantly increase time and cost savings, this project also helped scale up the Samsung Health business and prepare it for sustainable growth.
Just a few of the outcomes of Samsung Health&rsquo;s partnership with HFC:
<ul>
 <li aria-level="1">Initial app launch to tens of millions devices</li>
 <li aria-level="1">Robust apps that logged activity to Samsung Health as well as user and video playback behavior</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">A solid foundation for continuous optimization and improvements for these apps after the initial launch on millions of TVs</li>
</ul>
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
Building an app isn&rsquo;t easy and can come with challenges throughout the product lifecycle. Building a new platform of apps&mdash;ensuring compliance with different partners and adhering to unique brand identities for each one&mdash;is even bigger and more complex.
By bringing in an experienced partner with deep expertise in building connected experiences, Samsung Health was able to empower fitness studios to build custom TV apps quickly, and set its customers up for richer and healthier lives&mdash;right from their living rooms.
Want to create a connected and cohesive digital experience across devices?&nbsp;
<a href="https://www.happyfuncorp.com/contact-us">Let&rsquo;s chat!&nbsp;</a>

We launched multiple Tizen apps in Samsung Health’s expansion to TV, bringing native fitness experiences to millions of homes.

How Samsung Health Launched Its TV App Offerings

PVH is a leading American clothing company that owns Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein, and also licenses brands like Kenneth Cole and Michael Kors.&nbsp;
With such a global reach, PVH recognized that its impact on sustainability was huge. It wanted to launch a new sustainability plan at The Copenhagen Fashion Summit&mdash;the largest event in the world for sustainability in fashion&mdash;alongside a beautiful new web experience dedicated to the future of sustainable fashion, dubbed &ldquo;Forward Fashion.&rdquo;
<h2>The challenge</h2>
Forward Fashion wasn&rsquo;t just a website. It needed to house a suite of multimedia content including reporting, content, storytelling, and thought leadership.
This digital hub also needed to be able to continue to evolve with PVH&rsquo;s strategy over time, so longevity and usability were key considerations. PVH&rsquo;s team also wanted to be able to easily update and add content on their own without a lot of technical support.
And finally, given that PVH is a fashion brand, nailing the look and feel in the design&mdash;along with pixel-perfect implementation&mdash;was critical.
PVH chose HFC to help them:
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Build a user-friendly and nimble digital hub for the team to advance its strategy and share content and storytelling through thought leadership and beyond</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Recommend and implement a new CMS that could support the many different types of media needed</li>
</ul>
<h2>HFC&rsquo;s approach</h2>
HFC designers partnered closely with PVH&rsquo;s design agency, Futerra, to develop designs that fit the style guide and component library for the project.&nbsp;
After hearing Futerra&rsquo;s design requirements and PVH&rsquo;s goal of building easily customizable pages after project handoff, HFC decided to go with a static approach for the build of the online hub.
With long-term hosting requirements not yet finalized, and a static approach meant that Fashion Forward would be able to live on any type of hosting setup, which provided more flexibility given the lack of clarity.
And because this was a content-driven website with SEO being a major consideration, this approach boosted performance since the site would be hosted straight from a CDN, thereby avoiding runtime compilation.
The tech stack
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">DatoCMS via GraphQL</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Next.js</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Linaria</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Netlify (which was later changed due to new client requirements)</li>
</ul>
HFC selected <a href="https://github.com/callstack/linaria">Linaria</a> as a CSS-in-JS solution because it offered more flexibility (like dynamically scoped CSS per component) and also allowed the team to fall back on an environment that used PostCSS or a preprocessor if needed.
This decision was mostly influenced by agency workflow considerations and this project&rsquo;s specific need for flexibility. Linaria also has the added benefit of not requiring any run-time dependency, which is a performance gain over most CSS-in-JS alternatives.&nbsp;
The CMS&nbsp;
Content and data for this static website was managed through external APIs. And given PVH&rsquo;s requirement to be able to create completely unique pages (not just from a set of prebuilt templates), HFC understood that they needed a CMS (Content Management System) with strong modular content features.&nbsp;
<table>
 <tbody>
 <tr>
 <td>
 What is modular content? Modular content (sometimes referred to as &ldquo;blocks&rdquo;) is the concept of having atomic components make up a page. In other words, you&rsquo;d build a web page using each module as a building block, as opposed to creating a page using a template with a predefined structure.&nbsp;
 </td>
 </tr>
 </tbody>
</table>
This led the HFC team to recommend a headless CMS. Unlike traditional CMS platforms like Wordpress or Squarespace, a headless CMS splits up the management of a website&rsquo;s content and backend model.
Based on past experience with headless CMS platforms, HFC recommended DatoCMS, which combined a straightforward UI (user interface) and a high level of customizability, using GraphQL or REST APIs to retrieve the content.&nbsp;
The framework
Next.js was the best fit due to project requirements and from an agency perspective, the value of Next.js was that it offered a unified framework for node-based Server-Side Rendering (SSR) as well as the ability to export to Static Site Generation (SSG).
<table>
 <tbody>
 <tr>
 <td>
 SSR vs SSG: These are both ways to render a webpage, and depending on the type of webpage you&rsquo;re trying to view, one is better than the other. For example, SSG creates fast-loading pages that are pre-rendered while SSR renders a page in real time, which ensures that any dynamic elements on the page (like a real-time stock chart) are up-to-date.
 </td>
 </tr>
 </tbody>
</table>
This &ldquo;Universal&rdquo; approach meant that the team had a common tool for both styles of projects, and also future proofed the website in case it needed SSR functionality (like adding user authentication) later on.&nbsp;
<h2>The result: A beautiful online home for sustainable fashion</h2>
Launched in time for The Copenhagen Fashion Summit, the Forward Fashion website features stunning photography, videos, and other engaging content.
As a result of a truly collaborative effort, the PVH team can easily populate the hub with simple yet elegant content modules, continually updating and adding to it. Forward Fashion can continue the work started in Copenhagen over the coming years, cementing PVH&rsquo;s position as a leader in sustainability.
Looking to build a multimedia content hub that&rsquo;s user-friendly and easy to maintain?
<a href="https://www.happyfuncorp.com/contact-us">Let's chat!</a>

How This Global Fashion Brand Created a Multimedia Content Hub for Sustainability

A family-owned business for three generations, Architectural Designs sells home plans to builders and homeowners across North America and internationally, with designs for everything from starter homes to elaborate luxury homes.
Over the years, the company has evolved from its magazine days to an online search engine for house plans, incorporating new processes and technology to create a better experience for both their customers and prospective customers. Today, they are a business with millions of monthly website visitors, a commanding presence on social media platforms like Pinterest and Instagram, and strong growth year over year.
Jon Davis and Kitty Connor, Architectural Designs&rsquo; CEO and COO, manage much of the company&rsquo;s strategy and day-to-day.
<h2>The challenge</h2>
Architectural Designs was facing a variety of challenges with its website and digital experience that impacted its e-commerce revenue, the effectiveness of its marketing, and even communications with its designer partners.
They needed to revamp their digital experience&mdash;quickly. So, Jon put out a call for help in his network. &ldquo;Two people gave me a list of names, and HappyFunCorp was the only name that was on both lists,&rdquo; says Jon.&nbsp;
Architectural Designs chose HFC to help them:
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Find ways to minimize the opportunities for human error in their e-commerce experience</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Automate the modification request process, an important service offered to customers, reduce friction for customers who want to make changes to home plans, and create a streamlined process for designers handling the changes.</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Improve how customers are segmented and tailor their marketing communications.</li>
</ul>
&ldquo;The range of talent at HFC is so broad that if you need something&mdash;whether it&rsquo;s technical, front or back end, marketing, whatever it takes to run a digital business&mdash;there are experts who can come in at a moment's notice and help.&rdquo; &ndash; Jon Davis, CEO
With the new website, Architectural Designs&rsquo; conversion rate shot up, tripling their previous conversion rate just 18 months earlier.
<h2>HFC&rsquo;s approach</h2>
After assembling a team with deep technical expertise in building for scale, HFC revamped the digital experience for a range of core areas in Architectural Designs&rsquo; business:&nbsp;
Website - To improve the website&rsquo;s online shopping experience, HFC used Elasticsearch to create a fast, customized search engine on Architectural Designs&rsquo; website to make it easy for customers to find just the right plan in a catalog of 25,000+ plans. Today, HFC continues to enhance and modernize search with generative AI.&nbsp;
Finance - HFC designed a tool for Architectural Designs&rsquo; finance director that automates designer payments with emails itemizing monthly payment breakdowns to designers. This eliminated the need to manually prepare and send hundreds of emails a month taking up significant time.
Partners - Architectural Designs&rsquo; sells a list of materials that customers can purchase when they buy a home plan that itemizes everything needed to build the home and is generated by an outside partner.&nbsp;
HFC built a new system that made it easy to track revenue, track and fill orders and store the lists for future distribution.&nbsp;
Integrating the tech stack - HFC built a suite of custom integrations specifically tailored to the Architectural Designs team&rsquo;s daily workflows and processes, including:&nbsp;
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Mailchimp for drip emails and newsletter campaigns</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Sendgrid and Twilio for transactional and programmatic marketing emails</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Avalara for state sales tax</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Gemini for generative AI</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Tableau for analytics and reporting</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Shopper Approved for customer ratings</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Wordpress for the company blog</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Braintree for payment</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Paypal for invoicing and payment plans</li>
</ul>
Modification process - Before, if Architectural Designs&rsquo; customers wanted to change a plan&rsquo;s foundation type or adjust anything on a house plan, every step was handled by staff through email. With annual requests exceeding mid-five figures a manual approach was no longer sustainable and HFC built a tool to automate the process by shuttling modification requests from clients directly to the designer for a quote and back to the customer with minimal human effort needed. Requests that were formerly tracked on a spreadsheet are now managed in a templatized system providing a personal quote to every customer and a mechanism to make the purchase and there&rsquo;s a reporting system behind the tools to track success.
<h2>The results: A sustainable, best-in-class e-commerce business</h2>
HFC helped Architectural Designs completely transform their digital experience for all of their partners and stakeholders, including customers, builders, and designers. Not only did the custom automation and integrations significantly increase time and cost savings, they also helped scale the business and prepare it for sustainable growth.
These are just a few of the outcomes of Architectural Designs&rsquo; partnership with HFC:
<ul>
 <li>10x revenue growth</li>
 <li aria-level="1">Tripled online conversion rates</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Thousands of quotes sent monthly as a result of an accelerated self-serve flow online</li>
 <li aria-level="1">Thousands and thousands of contacts in their email list</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Reduced drop-off in the sale process by automating alerts to the team when someone has abandoned their cart, so they can follow up</li>
</ul>
<h2>&ldquo;Working with HFC was fundamental to our success&rdquo;</h2>
From their early days as publishers to becoming marketers, to now leveraging technology to stay ahead of the industry&rsquo;s constant changes, it&rsquo;s clear that Architectural Designs has a strong sense of where their business and customers are headed in the future.
&ldquo;We're working towards using AI for search, we&rsquo;re investing in virtual tours,&rdquo; says Kitty. &ldquo;We're adding a sophisticated viewing system to the website to give customers the tools they need to actually visualize what their home will look like.&rdquo;
But the most important thing for Jon and Kitty is being able to stay nimble and maximize their biggest opportunities efficiently, even as the company continues to grow.&nbsp;
&ldquo;With HFC, we can say, &lsquo;Hey, I have this idea. Can you help me make it happen?&rsquo; We can dial things up and down, which gives me incredible flexibility. That choice to work with HFC was fundamental to our success, especially against heavy competition.&rdquo;
By keeping their team nimble and leveraging technology to continuously improve both the customer and employee experience, Jon and Kitty are ensuring that Architectural Designs can adapt quickly&mdash;and setting the business up for sustainable success.
&ldquo;If a business doesn't evolve, it becomes irrelevant and dies,&rdquo; says Kitty. &ldquo;We're always ready to pivot&mdash;we&rsquo;re forever evolving.&rdquo;
Want to improve your online experience and convert more customers, while reducing the burden on your team?&nbsp;
<a href="https://www.happyfuncorp.com/contact-us" title="Contact Us">Let&rsquo;s chat!</a>

How This eCommerce Business Tripled Conversion Rates and 10X-ed Revenue with a New Digital Experience

Today, Gatorade&rsquo;s Gx ecosystem is a huge ecosystem of state-of-the-art products designed to help the world&rsquo;s top athletes achieve peak performance, ranging from the Gx Sweat Patch (a small stick-on microfluidic patch that measures sweat rate, fluid loss, and more during a workout) to the Smart Gx Water Bottle (which helps you track your daily hydration levels).
But all of this incredible integrated technology was actually born out of an early partnership between Gatorade, Smart Design (a customer research, organizational design, and service design consultancy), and HFC.
Back in spring of 2015, Gatorade and Smart Design were looking for a way to realize their vision of an innovative, totally personalized hydration system for professional athletes. But they needed a partner with the technological skills and expertise to develop a cutting-edge Internet of Things (IoT) solution that brought together advanced data analytics, wearable technology integration, a kiosk, and customized fluid intake recommendations to create a seamless, user-friendly platform.
<h2>The challenge</h2>
Smart Design reached out to HFC to help build a bold new vision for Gatorade&mdash;a hydration experience that combined the latest in sports science research with new hardware devices that Smart Design had been building.&nbsp;
To successfully execute this concept, HFC had to architect and build the cloud and client software that would power the entire technical ecosystem. The team worked closely with Smart Design&rsquo;s designers to design and implement a platform that included a digitally connected scale kiosk, web portal, and web and iOS application for multiple organizations and user types, since it wouldn&rsquo;t just be athletes using the Gx platform&mdash;their hydration specialists and trainers were key users as well.
Gatorade chose HFC to help them:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Lead the development team to build a prototype and launch the first version of the web and iOS application for the Gx platform</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Build a recommendation engine that would highlight the correct Gx Pods (essentially premixed packets of sports drink concentrate) for athletes to ensure they&rsquo;re getting the right electrolytes at every stage of exercise and activity</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Work closely with their agency and team during design planning and physical deployments on-site at elite sports schools to ensure a successful rollout</li>
</ul>
<h2>HFC&rsquo;s approach</h2>
Using data and guidance provided by Gatorade's Sport Science Institute, HFC started building an integrated recommendation engine that calculated science-backed Gatorade formulas and quantities for individual athletes based on biometric data (like sweat tests) and upcoming scheduled activities.
This was the centerpiece of the Gx platform, which allows team managers and hydration specialists to track athletes&rsquo; hydration on a responsive web dashboard, a web-enabled scale, and smart water bottles that report fluid consumption in real-time.&nbsp;
HFC collaborated extensively with the Smart Design team during both the design phase and on-site implementation at top-tier sports schools.
<h2>The results: A next-generation hydration system for professional athletes</h2>
Within just a few short months, HFC and Smart Design rolled out an early version of the Gx platform in the summer before expanding the platform over the next year to include several pro sports teams.&nbsp;
In 2016, the Gx platform was named a finalist for a FastCo UX Design award.
Just a few of the outcomes of Gatorade&rsquo;s partnership with HFC:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">The Gx platform&rsquo;s UX was named an Innovation By Design Finalist in 2016 by Fast Company</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">By 2018, more than 50 professional sports teams worldwide were using the Gx platform including check-in stations, personalized sports bottles, and digital hydration-tracking platform</li>
</ul>
What began as a visionary idea in 2015 evolved into a cutting-edge hydration web platform that combines advanced sports science with seamless technology. Through this partnership with Gatorade and Smart Design, HFC has helped transform how athletes optimize their hydration and reach peak performance with data-driven insights and personalized solutions.
Today, the Gx platform is widely adopted by professional sports teams around the world, setting a new standard for hydration management. With its expanding ecosystem of smart products, Gatorade continues to push the boundaries of performance, ensuring that athletes at all levels can stay ahead of the game&mdash;hydrated, fueled, and ready to perform at their best.
Want to create an innovative digital ecosystem that integrates wearables, real-time data analytics, and a forward-thinking user experience? <a href="https://www.happyfuncorp.com/contact-us">Let&rsquo;s chat!</a>

From Sports Drink to Smart Tech: Inside Gatorade's Hydration Platform

If you&rsquo;ve ever had to submit an expense for work, whether it was for business travel or accounts payable, you might have come across Emburse.
Today, Emburse contains a whole suite of expense management and payments solutions like Abacus, Chrome River, Certify, and Nexonia&mdash;and is trusted by more than 12 million people and 20,000 organizations around the world, from global corporations to public sector agencies to small businesses.&nbsp;
But Emburse&rsquo;s journey to get here took many years, with a variety of both technical and strategic organizational hurdles for its team.
<h2>The challenge</h2>
A few years ago, Emburse (then branded as Abacus) was primarily an expense tracking platform with both web and mobile touchpoints. With limited resources and staffing at the time, its native mobile apps were in need of updates and enhancements&mdash;new feature developments had been deprioritized, with only essential maintenance being done to keep the app running well.
Emburse&rsquo;s team also wanted to build a new virtual credit card product at a time when the business was in the midst of becoming what would be known as Emburse today, in addition to weathering a pandemic and undergoing several reorgs.&nbsp;
With so much going on, the team wanted to focus on its priority initiatives such as updating key legacy applications to conform to a consistent set of standards for the growing business and building new centralized services. To maintain velocity on both work streams, they decided to outsource the improvements to its iOS and Android apps.
But to accomplish this, they needed a technology partner that didn&rsquo;t need much direction or internal resources to jump in on a strategic level and execute projects both big and small.
Emburse chose HFC to help:
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Provide ongoing technical leadership while the internal team was undergoing major organizational changes and shifts in priorities</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Ship key features for the mobile apps while Emburse was considering its longer-term mobile strategy</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Optimize the mobile app for production stability so that it could be white labeled and custom-branded for Emburse&rsquo;s customers</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Build out support for a new virtual credit card product</li>
</ul>
<h2>HFC&rsquo;s approach</h2>
HFC first performed a technical audit of Emburse&rsquo;s mobile codebases to de-risk the overall engagement, before starting the project.
This step was especially crucial because one of the projects in this engagement was the build-out of a new virtual card product, and it had a strict deadline. The audit of Emburse&rsquo;s existing codebases, tooling, and practices helped HFC gain confidence that the team could hit the tight deadline, even with design and backend engineering dependencies.
Training
While Emburse was in the process of hiring and training up a number of new team members to support the company&rsquo;s growth, HFC provided stability for the web team by embedding its own senior team members into Emburse&rsquo;s organization to work directly with PMs and engineering leadership.
These embedded specialists integrated themselves quickly, and hit the ground running to pick up the slack and continue the essential work that was needed during this time.
Ongoing development to update apps and support Emburse&rsquo;s sales process
As part of the ongoing work to update Emburse&rsquo;s native apps, HFC updated and refactored a lot of the code, which needed to be updated&mdash;for example, moving from Objective-C to Swift, which allowed for faster development.
Separately, because Emburse&rsquo;s business was mainly sales-driven, there were often &ldquo;reactive&rdquo; requests to make specific changes or improvements to the product to secure new customers and deals.&nbsp;
With the team&rsquo;s unique skill sets and deep understanding of the client&rsquo;s operational requirements, HFC stepped in to support Emburse&rsquo;s lean in-house team, provide reliable engineering thought partnership, and keep this work going during the many reorgs.
Strategic planning
HFC also provided fresh eyes and strategic input on the development process, outlining issues and proposing solutions that could be implemented over time.
On top of that, we also helped Emburse&rsquo;s team manage existing technical debt, providing recommendations on how to pay down tech debt while still hitting product release deadlines.&nbsp;
New feature development
Besides designing and building Emburse&rsquo;s new virtual credit cards, HFC also worked closely with the in-house team to develop other new features for Emburse&rsquo;s mobile apps.
A major challenge in the beginning was achieving production stability in Emburse&rsquo;s mobile apps, which eventually led to UI/UX updates and the addition of new features that made it possible to whitelabel those apps so they could be repurposed for Emburse&rsquo;s other customers.
<h2>The results</h2>
Along with successfully supporting the disparate projects initially tasked with, the team played a crucial role in stabilizing the business during Emburse&rsquo;s significant operational changes.
Emburse's journey from a simple expense tracking platform to a comprehensive suite of expense management solutions highlights not only its team&rsquo;s resilience, but also the power of choosing strategic and adaptable partners.&nbsp;
By collaborating with HFC, Emburse was able to overcome significant technical and resourcing challenges, and build a foundation for the continued growth of its products and business.&nbsp;

<a href="https://www.happyfuncorp.com/contact-us">Need a strategic partner that can help ideate and build for future growth?</a>

Building a Digital Roadmap That Balances Stability and Innovation

Before the crypto world caught fire, there was Paxos.&nbsp;
Paxos had been in the crypto asset business since 2012 and was the first to secure regulation in New York City in 2015, and from the beginning, its products were successful with institutional customers that were building their own integrations to Paxos&rsquo; APIs.
However, retail customers could only access Paxos&rsquo; products through third party exchanges, or they had to bring their own wallets&mdash;which was often a challenging user experience.
To capitalize on this opportunity and expand their customer base, Paxos wanted to build a B2C trading interface for retail investors. Their vision: a user-friendly retail experience that united new and existing products.

<h2>The challenge</h2>
HFC was brought in with the key task of consolidating Paxos' existing products and developing new offerings, all under a unified umbrella. This involved revamping Paxos' trading interface, introducing a stablecoin and digital wallet offering, and integrating a tokenized gold offering.
One of the challenges of this was that it required merging an outdated application into a larger brand-new application. On top of that, the new application needed to accommodate both institutional users along with individual consumers, which meant the UI had to be user-friendly and be able to guide users (who may need to understand what a wallet is, how quickly transactions occur, and so on) through the more complex flows of crypto trading and wallet management.
Paxos chose HFC to help them:
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Design a new product to harmonize with Paxos&rsquo; existing products, which were comprised of separate systems and built on different technology</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Design a user-friendly interface for retail investor trading that aligned with Paxos&rsquo; existing experience</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Update the marketing website to support the launch of these new offerings</li>
</ul>

<h2>HFC&rsquo;s approach</h2>
Paxos already had a deep bench skilled in backend development, but there were quite a few disparate teams that needed to be brought together.
One of the first things HFC did was to overhaul Paxos&rsquo; marketing website&mdash;an exercise that helped bring disparate teams inside Paxos together. The team also built a design system that could be deployed across a variety of touchpoints.
HFC also recognized that it needed to augment Paxos&rsquo; existing team with additional resources for frontend development, UX, and product management. So, HFC deployed two teams to embed themselves within Paxos:&nbsp;
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">a small, interdisciplinary product team that collaborated with stakeholders internally to ensure the product was designed effectively and could be executed by the technical team within the allocated time and budget, and&nbsp;</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">React developers who joined Paxos&rsquo; in-house engineering team to collaborate on the buildout of the new product</li>
</ul>
Design direction and branding - HFC adopted a design system-heavy approach from the outset, wireframing and gradually refining as the project progressed. This approach facilitated the creation of high-fidelity designs, which created more consistency and engineering efficiencies through the execution stages.
HFC also developed the design direction for the project, leveraging Paxos' existing branding materials and expanding on them to fill in functional UI elements required for the new product. This resulted in a more powerful and well-rounded design system that both streamlined production and ensured a cohesive user experience. Ultimately, this approach helped improve product development and implementation too because the design prioritized a seamless and enjoyable crypto trading experience.
Requirements gathering and collaboration - Even though the crypto industry is relatively new, there&rsquo;s a high level of complexity and technical knowledge required. Because of this, it was crucial to have a holistic understanding of the requirements and stakeholders involved.&nbsp;
HFC led product workshops with cross-functional stakeholders, and engaged in collaborative sessions with the Paxos team to unpack the challenge, gather requirements, and understand their customers&rsquo; needs and preferences. This collaborative approach was essential to establish clear project goals and ensure stakeholder alignment.
Responsive design and user experience - After gaining a deep understanding of professional traders' needs and preferences (for example, where to display crucial data across various breakpoints), the HFC team delivered responsive designs for a robust usability- and accessibility-focused trade experience.

<h2>The results: A better user experience for 12M+ active wallet users</h2>
As a result of HFC&rsquo;s and Paxos&rsquo; multidisciplinary approach and strong collaboration, the team successfully revamped Paxos' trading interface, consolidated and integrated existing products like tokenized gold, and introduced new offerings such as stablecoin and a digital wallet in a cohesive way.
Each of these products has its own complexities&mdash;for example, the digital wallet offering involves a KYC (Know Your Customer) process, which requires collecting information from users through a multi-step flow. This is for verification and integration with third party services for secure financial transactions&mdash;banks also use KYC to verify details and documents like drivers&rsquo; licenses or passport images.
Not only did the new product offerings and user experience improve customer satisfaction and retention, they also increased Paxos' competitiveness in the digital asset custody market by attracting institutional clients and expanding its market reach.
Just a few of the outcomes of Paxos&rsquo; partnership with HFC:
<ul>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Successful launch of key new products including the PAX stablecoin and a digital wallet</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">$120 billion in stablecoins issued and redeemed in the past 5 years</li>
 <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Over 12 million active wallet users&nbsp;</li>
</ul>
Now, Paxos is equipped with a new website that clearly communicates their unique regulated digital asset offerings to both institutional and retail customers, and is set to power the financial markets of the future.
<a href="https://www.happyfuncorp.com/contact-us">Need help with building or integrating digital products in a unified and cohesive way?</a>

How One of the World’s Leading Regulated Stablecoins Moved Into the Retail Investor Space—and Now Counts 12M+ Active Wallet Users

As a the leader in audio books, Audible wanted to emulate the same great experience consumers had with audio book app and build an HR app that welcomed new employees to the company in advance of their start date with pertinent information to set them up for success on the job day one.When we began our work, there was no technical solution and employees received static information via email. &nbsp;Zoe Rumford, VP of Human Resources, saw an opportunity to improve upon this given her prior experience with more developed tools &ndash; a fully functional HR app for employees that included employee onboarding. After researching the marketplace for off-the-shelf solutions, it was clear that none existed that suited Audible&rsquo;s needs.We set off to build a simple, flexible tool that would not only meet HR and new employees&rsquo; needs, but would also meet Amazon&rsquo;s.

We worked with Audible HR to level up employee onboarding with a customizable app 

Improving the Employee Onboarding Experience

Let's build something great.

When you reach out to us, our senior staff are here to help learn more about your needs and hand-pick a team that you’ll love.

Whether you're starting from the back of a napkin, a pitch deck, or a prototype in the marketplace, HFC can work with your team to craft award-winning digital experiences across user classes and channels. New Product teams from HFC offer a blend of strategy, user experience expertise, and technical acumen that comes from launching dozens of innovative products with startups and Fortune 500s alike for more than a decade.

New Products

Want to build a new application or platform from the ground up?

At a time of accelerating technological change including mainstreaming of AI/ML, many businesses are taking a hard look at their legacy technology. The tools and practices that worked before may not be competitive for long.
HFC partners with businesses looking to modernize, offering analysis, guidance, and technical execution that unlocks new potential.
For more than a decade, we&rsquo;ve helped startups and Fortune 500s alike level up their technology &ndash; and their teams. How can we help you?

Modernization

Reconfigure your stack to make it easier to scale and maintain, including adding new technologies like AI. 

Want to uplevel what you've already built? The landscape is more competitive than ever, and businesses are looking to find ways to optimize their offerings and gain an edge. 
With HFC's Product Accelerator, you get an actionable roadmap and full support whether you need to add a new feature, build a mobile counterpart, or scale your architecture.

Product Accelerator

Get some external support to uplevel an existing product or application.

Sometimes you need to bring in reinforcements when you're keeping up with business demands and growth. HFC can assemble and integrate a team that's tailored to your project needs, whether you want to develop a more sophisticated design system or gain top tier engineering talent to augment your team velocity.

Embedded Teams

We'll help you assemble a custom-built team that can hit the ground running and make an impact—fast...

The look, feel, and functionality of your digital touchpoints are critical to how your business performs. 
HFC has designed winning products for over a decade, taking a user-centric, technically minded approach. How can we support your business?

Experience Design

Craft seamless digital journeys across every touchpoint.

<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-ligatures: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit; font-weight: inherit; letter-spacing: 0px;">Not all collaborations have a clear beginning and endpoint, and not all problems can be solved through an RFP process.
From ongoing strategic support to one-off audits, HFC can provide both breadth and depth of product and technical experience as your consultative partner.

Strategy

Get both big-picture planning and tactical support at all stages of your product journey.

Our Work

We have a passion for building consumer internet products that move the needle for businesses.