DOGGYWIFF
Case studies
About the project/client
Doggywiff is a lifesaver in helping you arrange care for your dogs while you are away. All our sitters are reviewed through a background check and will give personal and loving attention.
Whether your dog needs care, exercise or just fresh air, Doggywiff connects dog owner with dog sitters simply. From now, you can enjoy your time while you are on holidays and relax.
Virtually every dog owner will have to leave their pet in the care of someone else at least once, whether due to work, a business trip, a vacation, or some unexpected event. But when two French dog lovers returned from a trip away to find their pets looking decidedly gloomy after a stay in kennels, they were left feeling decidedly unhappy with themselves.
But instead of simply sitting around feeling guilty, the pair decided to take action, by creating a marketplace to let dog owners connect with professional dog sitters, and so facilitating a stress-free experience for all – and one a million miles away from traditional kennels.
Involvement / participation
To guarantee there’d be no unreliable service providers, it was decided that all the sitters on the platform must be reviewed via a background check, to ensure that they’d offer personal, loving attention.
Of course, the needs of dogs varies depending on the circumstances – from simply a walk out in the fresh air, to daily exercise, to more involved exercise regimes. The aim of Doggywiff is that regardless of these particular requirements, dog owner can connect simply with dog sitters who provide a great service.
And because this is a full-featured platform, communication is kept as efficient as possible: owners can check sitters calendars to make sure they have availability before getting in touch.
Technologies
- • Create a finely-tuned UI/UX, making use of the best design thinking practice;
- • Integrate the platform with a convenient, EU-friendly payment gateway;
- • Provide an easy-to-adjust built-in feature for checking providers’ availability;
- • Perform several minor tech customizations to improve workflow.
Doggywiff had at first been running on the hosted version of Sharetribe, so the first stage of our work was to migrate over to Sharetribe’s open source product, which offers richer functionality and greater scope for customization.
As the client had come to us with a very precise and detailed technical specification, we were able to begin at the design stage. Once the visual part of the project was approved, we moved on to frontend development and Sharetribe customizations, such as connecting the availability calendar with hourly booking, integrating Stripe Connect, and implementing a multi-language feature.
At this stage, Doggywiff is already up and running – but there is still a list of upgrades and modifications to add in future updates.
Backend: The platform sits on the Sharetribe open source engine, which is based on Ruby on Rails.The choice of MySQL allows us to harness the full power of a relational database storage engine while keeping the resource footprint of running a storage engine to a minimum.
We currently use the sidekiq library to manage long-running asynchronous backend tasks efficiently. Other parts of our backend technology stack include NodeJS for asset management, Sphinx full text search engine for its powerful search capabilities, and DelayedJobs for transparent execution of background tasks.
Frontend: Here we made use of stack comprising jQuery, jQuery UI, and jQuery plugins. Front end layout and interactions are taken care of with SLIM, SASS and CoffeeScript, all of which make for an efficient partnership with the Ruby on Rails stack.
The project also borrows the power of ReactJS, which helped us ensure our interface would offer a modern user experience.
Dockerized installation is used here as well.
The 3rd party integration: Stripe Connect.
Results
Our work on Doggywiff has moved the platform forward in some areas, leaving it both offering a better user experience and looking extremely fresh, with its redesigned main pages and new styling. Responsive frontend development provides a balanced view of the platform, while on the technical side, integration with Stripe Connect is a major step forward, as is the inclusion of Sharetribe’s availability calendar for hourly bookings.
With an eye to the global scope of demand, the platform is now available in two languages: English and French. The platform now accommodates such diverse services as dog walking, dog boarding, dog sitting, and dog daycare.
