New IHS Fairplay Mobile Apps Exceed Every Metric

When you think “mobile app” you may picture Angry Birds or smartphone scrabble. But many mobile apps are serious business, especially now that Fortune 1000s are getting in on the action. IHS Fairplay was quick to anticipate demand for mobile versions of its marine intelligence technologies and so hired expert app designers at Nitobi to help build cross-platform mobile versions of its enterprise apps, AIS Live and Sea-Web.

IHS Fairplay’s marine intelligence technology makes commercial shipping safer. AIS Live identifies and transmits the latest positions for over 80,000 ships. Sea-Web delivers comprehensive information about ships including characteristics, real-time movements, ownership, casualties and recently visited ports. These apps analyse the risk profiles of ships entering ports and deliver critical information about ship movements, ownership and casualties.

For Product Development Manager Simon Gladwell, building mobile versions of AIS Live and Sea-Web wasn’t about the cool factor of having a mobile app. When smartphone adoption boomed he rightly anticipated that customers would come to expect mobile versions of IHS Fairplay products.

Existing development commitments and a small in-house team sent Gladwell in search of a development partner that would deliver a quality product in the short six-month timeline he set for the project. He chose Vancouver-based mobile design and development experts, Nitobi. “When I spoke to Nitobi it was obvious to me that they were flexible as a company. They were agile. Most importantly, I felt they really ‘got’ what we were trying to achieve with our mobile apps.”

Gladwell also hired Nitobi because its developers are the creators of PhoneGap, the mobile app development platform Gladwell wanted AIS Live and Sea-Web mobile built with. PhoneGap is an open source solution for building cross-platform mobile apps with modern, standards-based Web technologies. Based on HTML5, PhoneGap leverages web technologies developers already know best including HTML and JavaScript.

IHS Fairplay customers use a wide a variety of mobile devices, so Gladwell and his team felt strongly that the mobile apps needed to support iOS, Android and Windows devices. “I knew PhoneGap was the right technology choice,” he said. “We simply couldn’t learn three new operating systems, three phone environments and three languages. We had to go cross platform.”

Before choosing PhoneGap, Gladwell reviewed competing technologies: “There were a number of supposedly cross-platform solutions but PhoneGap seemed the most popular and trusted.” PhoneGap also appealed from a technical perspective because it uses HTML, CSS and JavaScript–skills IHS Fairplay’s in-house development team already possesses. That means in the future the in-house team will be able to extend and develop the code Nitobi developed.

Six months on, the mobile versions of AIS Live and Sea-Web were running on iPhone, two versions of Android, Windows OS and the iPad. Nitobi is now in the process of porting the apps over to BlackBerry. “Nitobi were great to work with,” said Gladwell, “They were flexible, helpful and good communicators.”

According to Nitobi interaction designer Ryan Betts, translating user experiences from a click-based website to a touch-based mobile app is an exciting challenge. “Folding the richness of a desktop experience into a small mobile footprint is a lot like doing origami. You really have to focus each screen on one task, but you never want to lose complex functionality.”

“We also worked with the IHS Fairplay dev team to help solve some technical challenges, like needing to convert SOAP web services to JSON for payload lightness and easier JavaScript integration,” said Yohei Shimomae, also an interaction designer at Nitobi. Though this can be reasonably straight forward for the .net 4 framework, it posed some technical challenges on other platforms.

AIS Live and Sea-Web mobile apps have already lived up to IHS Fairplay and its customers’ expectations. “By all the measures that were set by the team and the business at large, the project is a success,” says Gladwell. The apps achieved their initial targets in just a couple of weeks of launch and have exceeded every metric we’ve set for them.