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Project Overview

Do you really want to wait until you’re back in the office late afternoon to find out your construction team’s started building with the wrong plans for that mega million dollar project that YOU are managing?

Organisation

Aconex

Team

Rob Phillpot, GM of Product (Project Sponsor)
Kirsten Mann, Director of User Experience,
Nicole Lawther, Senior Visual Designer,
Gordon Marx, Product Marketing,
Nathan Harrison, Business Analyst,
Bhaskara Laxminarayan Quality Assurance Engineer,
Ashok Kumar Quality Assurance Engineer and
IndiaNIC, Outsourced Development Team

Project Brief

Our clients rely on Aconex to help manage project risk.

Project members use Aconex to access, distribute, track and archive (but never delete) all of their project information.

We’ve developed the Aconex Mobile iPad and iPhone apps so our clients can use Aconex anywhere at any time.

Project Innovation / Need

Construction projects = hundreds of people generating thousands of documents each day.
Once construction’s started, every hour you spend waiting for that document, looking for that piece of correspondence or working from that wrong drawing means your project’s losing money.
Our apps go everywhere our clients need to go: a construction site, on a flight, inside a mine, the middle of the bush and everywhere in-between. And no-one’s wasting time, trekking back and forth between the site and the office to use a computer.
Our apps enable our clients to:

• Reply to correspondence straight away.
• Access the most current project documents from anywhere.
• Capture on-site information, such as defects, and instantly let their team know.
• Work on documents and mail while they’re not connected to a network (six hour flight to Perth, anyone?) and sync their work into the Aconex system when they’re back online.

Designing for a mobile device also meant we could empower our clients with some uniquely mobile features. For example, being able to take a photo of a bad paint job out on site and get it sorted out straight away.

User Experience

We’re really happy that our iPhone app’s been downloaded over 10,000 times. But we didn’t want to stop there. We wanted to create a unique user experience for the iPad. Why? To take advantage of the iPad screen-size and the more complex interaction patterns (and possibly because we’re gluttons for punishment).

While we were designing the app, we shadowed our users out on the construction site (it’s not as creepy as it sounds) to make sure we designed an app that helped our users become more productive.
During the seven-month development cycle we interviewed, re-shadowed and beta-tested with 40 passionate users. We tested our assumptions, went back to the drawing board, tore our hair out and started again many times.

But the feedback we’re getting now from our beta testers makes the extra effort worthwhile.

Project Marketing

Over the next 12 months we’re targeting at least an additional 5,000 clients using Aconex Mobile for iPad (as mentioned earlier, we’ve had 10,000 downloads of our iPhone app and we’re sure we can reach at least half that figure for our iPad app). One month into releasing our iPad app we’ve already hit 1,000 downloads, so we’re well on the way to meeting our goal.
We’re confident, that before long, our clients without an iPhone or iPad will be heading off to the Apple Store as the word is already spreading on constructions sites about how amazingly useful the Aconex Mobile apps are!

Because our client base is business oriented, our sales and support teams are the key for the success of our new products. Before the launch, we made sure they were excited about the app. We ran an educational program using the company intranet, internal newsletters, webinars and product demos. We then indulged in a little bribery when they didn’t read the intranet campaign.

For our iPad app launch, we’ve made a promo video and updated the corporate website. We also ran a media and social media campaign, giving interviews to key journalists and opinion leaders.

To reach our users directly, we ran a banner advert on our system’s login page, linking through to the video and more information. We also included features in our client newsletters and technical release notes.

We’re currently working on our next release, which will incorporate cutting-edge markup tools. In fact, it’s so cutting edge some of it hasn’t even been invented as yet.