BAJ App: Story of building an App for a tailoring shop in Kochi

I love solving problems with technology, what matter how small it is. This requirement came to me asked me to develop a solution in the form of an iPad application. When I searched about this business, I realized that this is a 35-year-old tailoring shop with elite class customers, including celebrities from the Malayalam film industry. Which makes me more interested in working on this.

Pain point
Only when it hearts, people started to search for solutions. In this case, the pain point was their record keeping. They kept their customer information like in old-style physical record books. But, unfortunately, many of them are damaged, pages are wrinkled, and got torn apart. This is the moment the client realized he can’t go for long like this. Because, like many businesses, for BAJ, customer data are most valuable and need a solution for keeping it preserved and safe.

Another paint point was the search for old records. How will you find a person’s apparel measurement if the customer doesn’t remember their serial number? Hmm, that another pain in the ass. You can’t always blame the customer for not remembering their serial number, especially when it comes to premium customers. So that also needs to be taken care of.

Finalized requirement
In the end, we agreed on the critical aspects which need to take care of

• Simplicity
• Easy to use
• Scalable
• Fast search among records

Once the requirement is locked, the next thing is the UI which needs to impress the client. Unfortunately, I’m not the best designer. Nevertheless, I do designs only to give a better interface to my Apps.

But after working on different concepts referring to so-called ‘Inspirations.’ I came up with a design that the client liked.

It’s the coding time!
Once the UI got finalized, it’s the stretching time for my fingers. I genuinely enjoy coding the Flutter UI. It’s the one thing I quickly got adapted to when I getting started with Flutter. When coding, I always make sure I complete at least 80% UI before jumping into API. Because once the UI is complete, you have something to show when the client asks for an update. But, when API integration starts, you are constantly dealing with errors and page breaks. So it difficult to give a demo in-between.

The back-end
When you throw the word ‘scalable’ to software engineer. He gonna start making things complex and make you pay for it. Like adding additional measures for future ‘scalability,’ starting from adding unwanted tables and columns in the DB, bringing new features, choosing not that necessary server infrastructure, etc. So, in the end, the App becomes complex and not user-friendly, and instead of thinking of scaling, you lose customers because of these complexities.

In the case of BAJ, scalability applicable because of a high number of records. And, since it’s an internal application, there wouldn’t be an out-of-the-blue user surge. So the only thing I need to take care of is the fast searchability, and firebase is the answer that pops into my mind. It’s fast, simple, and scalable, and I go for it. Another reason I did it because it makes things easy for me and makes it super affordable for the client. And nevertheless, no need to worry about the server infrastructure.

Delivery time
When you deliver the final product, it should satisfy the client’s requirements and, more importantly, bug-free. The second one is more important than the first because otherwise, it will return to you like a boomerang and kick your butt. So when I delivered the App, I make sure its bug free. And if there is an uncompleted part, I would have communicated it properly. So that’s how you make sure your side clear.
To my satisfaction, the client liked the final product and immediately started using it. The requirement was only for the IPad application, but I delivered the Android version too, and they are using both with utmost satisfaction.

That’s the beauty of Flutter. You can save the client a lot of money and provide multi-platform support from a single code base, which is really amazing. And that’s why I believe Flutter is the future of Apps.

And thank you for reading. Give me a thumps up if you liked it