Collaboration marketplace for
Digital Village

A team based project visualisation tool and smart contract system

Background

Digital Village is an Australia-based alliance bringing together entrepreneurs and developers for making excellent software products. Providing the enjoyable place for collaboration even locally, Digital Village uses bleeding-edge technology and work-life balance philosophy and pays particular attention to the possibility of live communication.

The union requested us to build a convenient platform where an entrepreneur could find and cooperate with high-skilled designers and developers. Working in close-knit teams, all of them would experience simplicity and ease of use.

Challenges

The client’s team reached out to us, asking to establish a platform for collaboration between experts and clients. The primary object was to combine comprehensiveness of the web app and the transparency of the work processes.

So these are the goals we had:

Simple and clear UI
The multiplicity of user roles
Opportunity to build functional teams
Capacity for extended search
Lean project management
Suitable administration board

Jason Hardie

Founder of The Digital Village Australia

“The Codica team have been terrific to work with. The ability to interpret business needs and apply them with little guidance has been of great value for our Startup.

The outcome of our Beta version is perfect for our needs and the technology foundation is there for future rapid growth.

A partnership of trust and respect is reciprocated and we look forward to working with Codica into the future.”

Solutions

Pure and simple UI design

We assessed the work requirements and aimed at the goals to realize. Our team wanted to develop a web application which would both be functional and express the philosophy of our client.

Focusing on outright availability to all the project details, we designed plain and simple UI which offers a smooth usage.

For the fast and effective application development, we set up Guidelines. It allowed our team to finalize the app interface, following the sequence of its changes, which includes titles, subtitles, headings, text and font size, etc.

To implement a smooth UX, we used React library. It provides rapid request processing, without overloading the page.

Account management

Users can sign up as a client or as a specialist. They will have to confirm their registration via e-mail after signing up. Fundamentally, there are three roles for specialists and one for a client:

Client

When a user signs up as a Client, they create a project and submit it to a Producer. After a project acceptance, a Client can create, edit and view Modules.

Active developer

An active developer is visible in the search results. In addition, a specialist can join a team via invitation from a Producer and participate in a project development.

Core developer

This is almost the same as the previous one, but with a bit expanded delegations. Besides all the earlier mentioned, Core developers can create custom teams and invite other developers to team’s channels via search.

Producer

A producer has the broadest possible range of authority. They run the project from start to finish. Producers create Project, Modules, and Epics, they search and attract people to a team. Also, they can assign specialists for each task and manage costs.

Functional teams

As teams are emerging particularly for the project, this page is supposed to reflect all the aspects of the activity.

Channels list

Since there are many tasks for a project and subdivisions inside teams, we integrated channels for each of them. It keeps all the team members from the mess and saves from the discussion of issues that are outside the scope.

Channel administration

As it often happens in the development process, the unit lacks a supplementary workforce. Thus, a Producer can add new members to a channel or remove them when necessary.

Comprehensive profile data

This page represents a full specialist’s background, including contact information, services they provide and even records on a company they work in.

Advanced search for the Pro

When it comes to building the team, a wide range of specialists should come along.

Besides the listing of professionals, the Search page contains search by keywords, both name and technology, plain filters, such as Project and Hourly Rate, and advanced, like experience level and project interest.

Furthermore, a user can go to a specialist’s profile and invite him to a team.

Lean project management

Each project needs a clear and transparent administration. That’s why the application provides an integrated control system which facilitates coordination and management of the team.

Drafting a project

A project contains a brief overview, depicting its terms, mission and scope.

Kanban board

The board represents a multifunctional but easy handling project management tool which allows tracking the development progress.

Modules

Modules are integral parts of projects. This is almost the same as sprints, which allows monitoring the process efficiently using the Kanban board.

Epics

Epics are part of modules. They include small tasks with responsible team members. Epics ensure the sequence of steps in the development process.

Admin part

We integrated a general admin to simplify the management and data entry and editing. Due to ActiveAdmin solution with some Arctic Admin features, database administration appears to be incredibly comfortable and pleasant to the eye.

Tech stack

Technologies

Ruby on Rails

PostgreSQL

React

Redux

JWT

ActiveAdmin

RSpec

Semantic UI

Integrations

AWS

SendGrid

Sentry.io

Results

While working on Digital Village, we built a fully functional web application which provides deeper cooperation on projects. For now, this is a tremendous development platform with a large variety of opportunities for both clients and development teams. It is still expanding its borders, and we expect it to become a real Village for Agencies and independent contractors.

What’s the outcome?

Simple and attractive UI
User-friendly search function
Effective project management
Operational teams
Convenient Admin part

We are communicating with the client, broadening Digital Village and enhancing it permanently.

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