"Any development needs my team has Quave has us covered. We've had 100% success rate with Quave."

— Peter Brown, Pathable CTO

Overview

Millions of people have been using Pathable's platform to engage attendees at physical and on-line events. It combined live streaming, on-demand content access, and shared engagement experiences to allow users to bring content to life and promote excitement, no matter where attendees are.

Challenges

Three years ago, Pathable's number of virtual events boomed. They soon realized they had to augment their team capacity to keep up with:

• A growing number of events
• A large number of users accessing the app at the same time
• Requests from customers for new features
• Requests for new integrations

They realized they needed to find a reliable partner quickly. Someone that could bring the right mix of experiences to the table and help scale and further develop their application.

Pathable found Quave to be the right partner.

Since we started our partnership with Pathable, more than 15 of our people worked alongside their team. We allocated several profiles, including Developers, DevOps, Designers, Product Owners, and Tech Leads.

Development

Our team was responsible for several areas, including:

• Architecture: our team helped define how the system could deal with the increasing load. After some investigation, we came up with a plan and set of implementations to scale the application.
• Integration: most of Pathable's customers ask for integrations with their proprietary or third-party systems, such as AMS or CRM platforms. We had a dedicated team to support the development of these new integrations or maintain the existing ones.
• New features & Foundation: our team implemented several of their existing features, including Lead scanning (QR Code). We also worked directly in the core system: Offline support, Cordova integration (Native app), Native app build and delivery in stores, White-label setup, Zoom integration, and Render time optimization.

DevOps

We completely switched their DevOps & Infrastructure to a state-of-the-art level. Here are some of the most important things we did: AWS cost optimization, setting up the Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD), switching from infrastructure to infrastructure-as-code, environment monitoring, end-to-end tests setup with full environment restore.

Product definition

With several customer requests coming at the same time, most of them related to new features, it was our product owner's role to prioritize the work, define the requirements and validate the final delivery with the customers.

Product design

One of the outstanding areas of Pathable's product was their in-app user experience. Our designers were the ones that shaped that experience.

Over the years, we've had the opportunity to work on numerous features. In this section, we'll highlight one of them to provide insight into our design process. Since you might not be familiar with the product, please keep in mind that not all the decisions we made may be immediately evident to you.

The feature we'd like to showcase is called "Call Now." It was designed to facilitate communication between virtual trade show attendees and booth staff members.

The user story driving this feature was: "As a virtual trade-show attendee, we want to easily contact booth staff representatives so we can make purchases, sell our products, or establish connections to benefit our business."

Our initial step was research. While we understood the attendee's needs, we needed a deeper understanding of the organizations participating in the trade shows. We sought answers to questions like: How many representatives would typically handle calls during the "Live" hours? How long would they be available to manage virtual booths? How should calls be distributed among representatives? Given that calls often led to sales, it was crucial to ensure fair treatment of all staff members.

To gather insights, we collaborated with our sales team, and our product owner engaged with them to gather feedback. Concurrently, we conducted one-on-one interviews with our partners and resellers. We consolidated this information to form a comprehensive overview. Once our questions were answered, we validated our ideas with all stakeholders.

We proceeded to work on the prototype, engaging in quick iterations. We believe in sharing our work early to gather as much feedback as possible. This iterative process involved incorporating feedback into our designs and repeating the cycle. With the entire team aware of the design direction, we encountered fewer surprises along the way.

Ultimately, we arrived at a prototype that satisfied everyone on the team. We shared it with stakeholders, the partners who helped shape the requirements, and our sales team. After one final round of refinements, we arrived at the following design:

This is the prototype from the perspective of an attendee visiting a booth:

This is what would happen if all the booth staff representatives were busy and the attendee couldn't get a hold of anyone:

Marketing website

We also designed and built Pathable's marketing website on WordPress.

Read another case study:

Partnering with Sneakpeek to overcome technical challenges for launch.

Read Case Study →