Winning awards is so uplifting – gaining recognition from others that you have a great team and offer some of the best user experiences has created a good feeling amongst everyone at Digital Wonderlab, after a year of supporting all our clients to achieve their vision and delight the people they care about, making a positive impact in their world.
Great teamwork
Picking up the coveted “Tech Team Of The Year” award at The Techies last week genuinely made us speechless, to be recognised ahead of the very talented short list of finalists from across Swindon and Wiltshire was such a great honour for the team, who genuinely care about all the work they do.
We have been able to focus upon some rewarding partnerships and amazing projects which have genuinely made life better by solving some of the fundamental challenges faced by communities around us – from working with charities and Not For Profit organisations such as The Charlie Waller Trust, Wiltshire Air Ambulance, Cerebral Palsy Cymru, and Great Western Credit Union, right across to tech start-ups like Stratigens and healthcare organisations like Alliance Pharma – we are making a difference whilst creating long lasting positive change.
Pro-bono work lies at the centre of Digital Wonderlab, and during the pandemic this became more important than ever, seeing the team donate time, expertise and funding to enable great causes realise their digital potential, offering over £95,000 worth of consultancy and design support time to charity partners in the past year. We also also built creative partnerships to help these organisations move forward on their digital journeys, delivering over £250K of savings and increased revenue.
Our values are our backbone and guide us in all that we do, day in and day out: With eyes wide open we ask why, are curious and see what others can’t; we challenge with confidence not only ourselves, but also our clients, and our beliefs to ensure we succeed collectively; we make space and create to share ideas, allow them to breath and enable people to explore new possibilities; and we craft with purpose beautiful technology that delivers real impact to its users.
Having a good strong team is paramount for any organisation, and we definitely have one of the best; they not only pull together for themselves, but do so for the business and each other, and the community around. Most importantly our entire team was involved in the positioning of our new brand – bringing together our values and purpose to be a force for good in the world.
Offering the best experience
Getting a second award for “Best User Experience” was an incredible accolade for us and our partner Samten, as we both firmly place people at the centre of everything we do - knowing that working alongside technology is where magic meets logic to bring some incredible results. So we wanted to share a little more about what this looked like with the judges, so they could get a feel for the project and the impact it is having for its users.
Samten needed to find the right digital partner to relaunch its meditation app solution to market, delivering an enhanced version that would build on key learnings from a disappointing first iteration and provide a better user experience.
With over 70 million working days lost each year due to mental health problems in the U.K. alone, costing employers more than £2.4bn per year, it was time to bring a solution to provide self-help enabling people to develop their own mental health and wellbeing plans to cope with the world around them.
Success criteria built in from the very outset included enhancing the user experience on both iOS and Android phone app, so it was bug free, elegantly designed, and intuitive for people to engage with.
Importantly the existing users need to seamlessly transition into the new app with ease.
Throughout the discovery, wireframe and solution design process, our focus was on the meditation journey that users would embark upon - making it as seamless and supportive as possible, with beautifully crafted technology that flows naturally for practitioners.
UX and UI is fundamental to the success of the new Samten app. We took the time to explore and understand user needs and their meditation motivations to deliver a digital solution that supports individual journeys towards deep mindfulness practice.
Our approach to the build of the application entailed a repurposing of the data base structure, where enhanced tables were needed to support the new native app and the API services alongside the auth server. It has been deployed through Azure using a series of iterations where we took time to “test and learn” with key users around their experiences of each section through on-going feedback and new releases.
The app is a core part of Samten’s wider tech ecosystem, directly supporting the business’ future ambition to build a global compassionate community, one breath at a time, and help corporate organisations by offering its meditation expertise as a wellbeing benefit to their employees.
