Responding to Requests for a Proposal (RFP) is a normal part of the job when you’re on a sales team. Here at Atiba and Cabedge, we receive a lot of them each month. Sometimes we are one of hundreds of companies spending time explaining the process, doing the research to match up your offerings with the needs of the client and finding examples of past work to showcase. So when the Tennessee Secretary of State sent out their RFP last year about building a mobile application to help with the voting process, we were super excited to learn we were one of three companies who got to come in to pitch our idea. We were even more thrilled when our team was chosen to complete the project.
The ultimate goal of this project was to work with the folks in the Tennessee Secretary of State’s office to create a smart phone application to provide accurate and timely election information to Tennessee citizens in an intuitive manner. Users were to be able to use the application to conveniently obtain individualized information to help them in the process of voting, including:
- Early voting and Election Day polling locations and hours of operation
- Candidate list for upcoming elections
- Ability to mark sample ballots for upcoming election
- Navigation to early voting and Election Day polling locations
- County election commission information
- Access online election results through the application
“This is another Tennessee voter resource that answers common questions about voting from one’s phone,” Secretary of State Tre Hargett said, “The free app allows you to view voter-specific information when searching by name or address. While our team had experience with web design and API development, we had never launched a mobile application. Atiba helped us take that next step in providing election information to Tennessee voters conveniently through their mobile devices.”
Our process for projects is simple, yet powerful: discover, define, design, develop and test. What we’ve learned after being in business for over 22 years is that the key to a successful project is a detailed discovery session with all key players involved that leads to an approved project plan. Amy Rochelle, leader of our mobile application team as well as our project management conducted a detailed discovery which then defined the project clearly and established the timeline for an aggressive phase 1 launch, specifically to allow ample time for testing before early voting.
During the design phase, our designer created a patriotic template with an icon set that was simple for users to understand. Development then began, using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript/JQuery utilizing PhoneGap/Cordova. The Atiba team had weekly, sometimes daily check-ins with the development team from the state to ensure updates were tested on all platforms and any bugs were investigated and fixed in a timely manner.
Overall, this project was a smashing success, staying on time and on budget while creating a fully functional finished product for our end users. Andrew Dodd, elections attorney and project liaison said “both the mobile app and the web app got very good traffic. We’re at 13,576 downloads—8,784 iOS and 4,792 Android and we got as high as the #11 free Reference app in the App Store for a few hours on Election Day. We’re very pleased.”
