The City's needs were a major focal point for the project. RVA needed to provide an easy-to use service for its citizens while balancing its own internal requirements. Duplicate service requests were a problem we needed to help solve. Upvoting was one way we proposed to address duplicate requests, as well as both map and list views of nearby existing requests. We worked with AvePoint during the agile development phase to find the best presentation of similar requests nearby, and to encourage citizens to use the app in ways that would streamline responses from city workers. The city's GIS integration was necessary because requests could only be made within the city limits and needed to correspond with street addresses the city workers could find, even if the user's pinned location was somewhere like a park.

While we worked to accommodate the needs of the other stakeholders, we also needed AvePoint to accommodate our needs. There were components set up in the legacy system, such as HTML formatting in alerts, that were not compatible with the mobile app's requirements. We also needed to make sure that the mobile app could handle rendering the iconography returned from the backend, and had to work to adjust the designs so that the mobile performance could be optimized.

Of course, we also had to keep in mind the needs of the end users of the mobile app. We set up usability testing to get direct feedback from users, and made sure our QA process included testing in real-world scenarios, including areas of the city with reduced cell coverage and places that required the city GIS to match user location with proper addresses. Users need to be able to easily find the service types they are looking for, and complete the request submission process in as few steps as possible without sacrificing informational completeness. The city wanted to encourage account creation, but allow users to also submit anonymously so that they felt comfortable making requests their neighbors might see.

AvePoint spent years developing a city services portal system to address common needs of municipalities. The city admin side of the system needed to allow admins to create a multitude of request types, with different custom configurations, conditional fields, references to relevant FAQs, and internal reporting requirements. They needed to make sure the mobile and web apps would accommodate their backend system's architecture, and that the changes made in the backend wouldn't break the dual front ends. We were in constant communication with each other to make sure we worked in lockstep towards our shared goals.