SummerTimes
Compliance within weeks
SummerTimes runs inbound travel in Mauritius: drivers, guides, airport staff, and the people who allocate them across a day of arrivals. All of it ran on paper: sheets printed each morning and handed out. They came to us with a compliance deadline, a budget that would not stretch to native apps, and one system to fix. We ended up building four.
At a glance
- Client
- SummerTimes (Manahe LTD)
- Where
- Mauritius
- What it is
- Inbound travel operations: drivers, guides, airport staff
- How long
- Two weeks to compliance, ongoing since
What changed
2 weeks
from printed sheets to a working allocation system, inside the deadline
1 → 4
the driver app became guides, airport staff and the allocation dashboard
Nothing to submit
progressive web apps install from a link and update the same afternoon
The work
Why we did not build native apps
The obvious answer was a native app for the drivers and another for the office. On this budget and this deadline that meant two codebases, two release processes, and talking every driver through installing and then updating something from a store, before anyone had used it once.
So we proposed progressive web apps instead. One build, sent as a link, updated the same afternoon somebody found a problem with it. We gave up deep integration with the operating system, and we made anything offline-first harder on ourselves. For a driver opening the morning's allocation on a phone with signal, neither of those was the job.
They asked us to fix the allocation. We found the same sheet being printed three more times: for the guides, for the airport staff and for the people doing the allocating. That is why we did not stop at the drivers, and why the second conversation was a different size from the first.
The design system came out of that work rather than ahead of it. Four apps made in sequence under a deadline either share their components or drift apart, and drift is what makes the fifth one slow. We built it once, at the point we knew there would be a fourth.
What it took
A two-week compliance deadline on the first system. We have been working with them since.
- UX and UI design
- Digitalising an operation that ran on printed sheets
- A design system across four applications
- Progressive web apps for drivers, guides, airport staff and allocation
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