Building a capable touch screen Trade Show presentation app
Problem:
A client wanted an app to showcase products and experiences with touch screen displays at trade shows. They were already paying for a very expensive software. They had seen what we did with a previous SaaS graphics project and wanted us to build a more capable app for them.
Details
This app has two parts
1. CMS:
This is used as authoring tool where different screens are created using images, videos, texts, buttons, popups with pages containing image/video/text explanations, transitions etc.
2. Desktop Application:
This application downloads the CMS data updates from web and creates a touchscreen experience. After download it can work without internet connections. This application can be imagined like a supercharged power point slideshow but with touchscreen, popups and more interactivity. It has background images, background videos, image slide transitions, video to video transitions, popups windows, each popup has swipe-able pages, each page has flexible layout of images, videos, and text.
We ended up winning this project as our proposal had many benefits over the competition. The key winning factor was that due to our flexible system design we could easily add functionality in CMS such as duplicate a slide or duplicate a popup, track changes. Another winning feature was that we could create non rectangular windows, this opened up possibilities of very innovative designs like circular windows.
The application could also work with air gap environments (aka offline without internet connection), without needing a server or even database (trade show executives do not have experience in installing and keeping database servers up), download only updated content for fast modifications and so on.
The application has been has been very successful and is in use since several years. Over the years, as requirements evolved and client expanded his target market, client has been very happy that our application architecture has stood the test of time to ever evolving requirements.
Along the way, we have guided client to keep tech debt under check so application stays nimble. Note that many times it meant less work and less revenue for us. We believe that by taking long term view and doing the right thing it pays off in the long run. The client has not only stayed with us over the years to enhance this application but also been bringing us more projects.
Result
The client has been able to use this application not only for trade shows but also for corporate displays, corporate events and other marketing events. Client has been a happy client for years and has brought in several new projects for mutual gains.
Here are a few images of finished project live on a trade show floor:
