An app to empower the tradie community by flipping feedback on its head.
Feed4ward was conceived by a visionary director of a plumbing business, facing a real world issue – clients who were mistreating his staff, causing delays, and often not even paying for the work they'd done. In a world where "the customer is always right," sometimes they're just not, right? He figured, it would be invaluable to know what warning signs to look for. That's when this thought popped up: if clients can leave reviews about our businesses, telling others who to work with or avoid, why can't we do the same thing for our clients?
The challenge
Kodaa was presented with a pretty fun challenge: how can we create an app that lets trade businesses rate and review their clients and share that info with their professional network? It was a fantastic concept, but it came with its own set of hurdles. We would have to think through a number of issues, like how negative reviews about a person could be seen as defamation. That meant we needed to find a way to keep reviews from being directly linked to a person, while still giving trade pros the info they need to keep their team and business safe.
The app had to be user-friendly, letting trade professionals leave honest and helpful reviews quickly, all while keeping the client's identity under wraps from the public eye.
What we did
First order of business, we got our thinking caps on. That's when Kodaa's founder and Technical Director, Seth, really shines. He teamed up with our development partner and came up with a system where the app backend would match reviews based on specific client details. But - that data would be totally hidden and protected using hashing, a kind of digital encryption process. Once the system was all planned out, it was time to work on the user experience. We created detailed wireframes for the app and worked closely with the client to make sure writing and searching for reviews was quick, easy and tailored for his audience.
We also whipped up a slick new logo and a brand identity that everybody loved. Once that got the green light, we designed every screen and made a prototype so the client could see what the final product would be like.
While doing all that, we were also helping our client make sure everything was legally shipshape and that nothing was being overlooked. We also helped come up with a strategy for launching the product, making sure there was a good balance between commercial interests and having enough content in the app to make it useful for users.
After all that, we handed the designs over to our development partner along with detailed specs. The app's being built as we speak, and Kodaa's keeping a close eye on it, supporting with testing, problem-solving, and managing stakeholders through each step of the process.
