How to start innovating instantly

Your needs

You’re a well established business. You’ve got your customers, your staff and cleverly thought out departments to maximise productivity. But something new is on the horizon — a challenge that requires a specialised SWAT team to handle effectively and efficiently. It can be the need to develop a new app, a piece of software, or relook your product’s UX or interface to add value to a preexisting platform.

Your teams run well as they are. It’s not worth your time opening up a whole new department, finding specialised employees and the right project leads to manage and slot into your hierarchy. Diluting your workforce by adding extra tasks to their already busy schedules will only ensure that nothing gets done right or on time, while risking productivity on your core product. You need a brand new department, already trained and efficiently managed at the click of your fingers.

How we help

With our deep multi-disciplinary bench of product designers and full stack developers, we create tailored SWAT teams that are competitively priced, specialised to your exact needs and precisely managed by experienced project leads. These teams tackle strategic projects with clearly definable goals, milestones and metrics to help organisations innovate. We’ve focused on attaining and developing specialists in all digital realms, ensuring that we have the right people for the specific problems you’re facing. With flexible contracts, these teams can be called in for a specific project, or become a permanent fixture for your ever adapting needs, employing elastic resourcing to swap out team members as necessary. These SWAT teams become an extension of your pre existing workforce, integrating into the relevant departments, sharing their expertise, transferring knowledge and stimulating work ethic to ensure that all parties remain at the top of their game.

Case Study: Elastic resourcing in motion

Our work with Cars.co.za

Cars.co.za is an online vehicle selling platform. They have a strong team of developers who maintain and manage their site and secondary products and tools, ensuring that their industry leading platform is bug free and always runs smoothly.

When Cars.co.za started to explore new ways to expand their platform they realised that their workforce would suffer if management diluted them across additional projects. Reassigning staff to new projects would interfere with ongoing ones and overloading staff with additional work just didn’t make business sense. More so, opening a whole new department for digital innovation would be costly, time consuming, and a management nightmare. Even the process of acquiring the right talent for the job would make the effort going in more troublesome than the product coming out.

But there was much to get done: relaunch their mobile app, develop new platforms to connect dealers with sellers, and revamping mailers that achieved their required goals, just to name a few.

Without the right expertise to tackle these projects from the get go without substantial training or hiring costs, all these endeavours would become financial blackholes. They needed a specialised, precisely managed digital innovation department, and they needed it yesterday.

We’ve been providing Cars.co.za elastic resourcing for over five years. In that time, we’ve compiled SWAT teams for UX, design, development and everything in between. Cars.co.za came to us when they needed to give their mobile app a complete overhaul. They didn’t need someone on their team who also knew a bit about app development — they needed a hardened team that were already well versed in the ins and outs of the field.

We rebuilt the app from the ground up. Working closely with project leads and combining their needs with holistic UX research, we reinvented how users interact with the app, smoothing out their experience, whilst our full stack developers were at the ready to rollout the updates. Our UI designers ensured that the Cars.co.za branding that their loyal user base was accustomed to integrated flawlessly with their modern new interfaces whilst ensuring to add that sprinkling of our special brand of delight that makes using our products a tangible, living experience.

And the results spoke for themselves. Users soon began spending more and more time on the app. The experience ceased to be something users had to do in order to see vehicle listings, and turned into something they wanted to do, because browsing listings became such a delightful experience.

It couldn’t have been done without the expertise of industry specialists ready at a moment's notice — definitely not in the timespan we achieved it in. And so, with these results as the proof of concept, a life-long partnership began.

As part of our integration process, we did a full analysis of Cars.co.za’s tech needs and developed a series of comprehensive solutions. We identified the broad range of skill sets needed to perform these tasks and began compiling adaptive SWAT teams tailored to each of them.

Match! is the perfect example of how we quickly adapted to their needs. Cars.co.za needed a product that would assist dealers in connecting with sellers. The problem here wasn’t one of code or concept, but of human psychology. How do you build a trust relationship between two parties? Our answer: in depth UX research and clever product design.

We shifted from a team of designers and coders to usability researchers. By doing face to face testing with the public, we were able to test, iterate, and test designs again, gradually honing in on our target. By the end, we had a product that we knew users would feel comfortable interacting with, taking away the preconceptions of car salesmen and giving them an experience they felt like they could trust.

As we collaborated with Cars.co.za on more and more products, our understanding of how to meet their user’s demands became ever more sophisticated. With some TouchFoundry team members becoming permanent fixtures in various Cars.co.za departments, we developed an expertise that allowed us to expand our offerings to maximize their output.

In our analysis of Cars.co.za’s tech needs, we had our UX/UI SWAT team assess their mailers. Motoring news is a highly effective way of keeping potential vehicle buyers and sellers hooked on the platform, and delivering this information in an adaptive, mobile friendly manner was pivotal. We redesigned their newsletter to be modular and scalable, meaning that whether users were reading at their desktops or on their mobile devices, news is a breeze to read. The scalable template we created for Cars.co.za’s content team reduced friction and margin for error with layouts, meaning more time for them to focus on what they do best.

Cars Awards is Cars.co.za’s annual prize giving to the best in class for every automobile category. The public trusts the content and awards Cars.co.za provides to vehicles, and users make purchasing decisions based on what they read. However, their current solution didn't scale gracefully, largely because it required hours of redevelopment every award season. We took this as an opportunity to streamline the process by implementing a content management system. Once again, we shifted gears, adapted teams, and worked closely with Cars.co.za product team to produce a CMS that content curators and creators could work with intuitively. Now when award season comes around, the Cars.co.za content team can simply upload their new content, and they’re ready for the red carpet.

Our latest endeavor is one of our favourites. For years we’ve been facing a recurring issue: how do you filter out spam listings and poor resolution photos that bring down the overall quality of the browsing experience? With a machine learning algorithm, of course. By taking advantage of Google’s Cloud Auto ML to develop our proof of concept, we used a predefined database of car images to train an algorithm to understand what a picture of a car looks like. Better yet, we trained the algorithm to be able to identify what angle the photo was taken at, meaning that it could categorise images into exterior front, back and side and interior, as well as the colour of the vehicle. Once our models were refined, we were able to produce our own custom tensorflow models, which significantly reduced hosting cost and processing scale. With this technology, Cars.co.za can ensure that all listings are comprehensive, high quality, and spam free, greatly improving user experience. But on Cars.co.za’s end, we were able to add additional value by implementing a license disk identification model. We were able to create a feature that checks every upload against a registration database, ensuring that no fraudulent listings can make it onto the platform.

Thanks to our elastic resourcing, there’s yet to be a problem that Cars.co.za (or any of our other clients for that matter) has thrown at us that we couldn’t solve, and as a result, we’ve enjoyed a multi-year relationship and in-depth understanding of each other's needs. Think you’ve got a challenge that we can’t handle? Try us.