Customer Success Stories

Delivering a best-in-class digital experience

Building a 5-star digital experience for Pride in London’s mobile app using React Native, promoting inclusion and accessibility for an improved user experience.

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NATS 11 (8)

6 months
From idea to a fully delivered, end-to-end mobile product

21,000 +
App downloads, +50% vs. 2017

5★
User ratings on iOS and Android 

AA
Accessibility standard achieved

Pride_heart_UXD+copy

The Challenge

Pride in London is a non-profit, volunteer-led organisation which works to provide a platform for every part of London's LGBTQ+ community and campaigns for freedoms that will allow them to live their lives on a genuinely equal footing. It's the world's largest curated LGBTQ+ festival, with over 300 events culminating in a Pride parade through Central London, drawing over 1 million visitors, including 30,000 parade participants from the UK and abroad.


Pride in London released its first app for the 2017 parade, 2018 brought more ambitious goals, both for the events themselves and for the digital experience alongside them. Red Badger worked with Pride in London to define the vision for the project, mapping a set of key requirements with inclusivity and accessibility at their core, reflecting the values and behaviour of Pride in London and respecting the diversity of the community it serves.


The main requirement was to encourage discovery of the festival's events and help Pride goers navigate the parade. Due to organisational challenges, the code from the previous year's app couldn't be reused, so the product had to be built entirely from scratch.

 

Our approach

At Red Badger we usually work in cross-functional teams, co-locating with our clients to enable short feedback loops and highly efficient delivery. On a voluntary project this wasn't possible, which made things particularly challenging.


At the outset, volunteers from Red Badger's Strategy, Branding, User Experience, Design, Delivery and Engineering teams sat down with Pride in London to collaborate on the product vision and roadmap. Together, they agreed the app had to be a place to promote and showcase the diversity of the 2018 festival and parade, helping people discover, plan and get involved in events, while keeping the experience simple and easy to use.

An early branding workshop helped define the design approach and creative vision for the app, with the team focused on delivering a richer, more cohesive experience for users.

When deciding which technology would best deliver a fully functioning app across two platforms, React Native came out on top for three reasons. First, it meant the project could be open sourced, giving back to the tech community Red Badger relies on so heavily. Second, it let the team develop skills in a growing technology with real potential.

collaboration-RZTFC
Featured image - Pride

The Results

Proud is the word that best sums up this project. Red Badger delivered an end-to-end, open source mobile product in 6 months, built with a genuinely cross-functional volunteer team on React Native, hitting a 5★ app experience with AA accessibility standards and helping 20,000+ people navigate the festival and parade.


The numbers back it up: 21,000+ app downloads (+50% vs. 2017), 1,000 daily active users (+280% vs. 2017), and 1,000+ hours of use on Parade Day alone,  with 5★ ratings on iOS and Android and a feature as App of the Day on the App Store.

 

But don't just take our word for it....

I loved working with Red Badger. From the very start of theproject, I felt the passion and energy of each and every teammember. You proved yourself to be a well-oiled machinegetting some really awesome, creative work out andworking to a schedule and deadlines. Everyone at Pride issuper excited and happy with what we’ve done.

Kristof_HS-12YvD
Product Owner, Pride in London Kristof Hamilton

KEY TAKEAWAYS

- Context
Pride in London needed a brand new festival app built from scratch in time for the 2018 parade, with inclusivity and accessibility at its core, to help over 1 million visitors discover events and navigate the UK's largest Pride parade.


- Approach
Assembled a genuinely cross-functional volunteer team across strategy, branding, UX, design, delivery and engineering; ran an early branding workshop to set the creative vision; and chose React Native to deliver quickly across iOS and Android as an open source project.


- Results
Delivered an end-to-end mobile product in 6 months, achieving 21,000+ downloads (+50% vs. 2017), 5★ ratings on both platforms, an 'AA' accessibility standard, and a feature as App of the Day on the App Store.


- Ways of Working
Worked as a pro-bono, volunteer-led team without co-location, aligning early on product vision and roadmap to keep the project moving despite the remote, voluntary setup.

 

We solve complicated problems in complex places

Red Badger is the product transformation consultancy for blue chips. Our product design capabilities and technical pedigree build high-performance digital platforms that get you closer to your customers and embed new ways of working. Your journey to an agile, innovative digital product organisation starts today.

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