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Company: Mango Studio
Project: Man V2
Dates: Jun 2007 to Sep 2007
How did the project start?
The male toiletries and cosmetics industry has shown remarkable growth over recent years. In the past five years the men's personal care category is reported to have grown to an estimated market value of £500 million in the UK alone. The Internet is an ideal outlet for selling to men and therefore a fast, convenient and private method of purchasing products was provided in an innovative and convincing way.
What options did you consider?
To create an online commerce website, an off-the-shelf package could have been installed. However, the administration and customer functionality is often excessively over complicated and often restrict the design and flexibility of the system. Therefore a tailored solution was developed that meets all the objectives.
Adobe Flex allows developers to create Flash applications that run identically across all major browsers. But it is not as open as AJAX. There is also a lack of online community support and the project timeframe was too strict. Ruby on Rails was also investigated.
What help and expertise did you receive?
TNS data has detected a colossal increase in the interest and usage of men’s grooming products. The market is growing steadily with an 8% increase up to £571 million in June of 2006. Mintel reports also demonstrated the same increase.
Did you face any challenges or learn any lessons?
The development of the shopping cart was very difficult due to a number of reasons. However, various problems were overcome during development, due to the continuous analysis, testing and evaluating. New and innovative techniques combining different server side and client-side technologies eventually led to the creation of the next generation e-commerce shopping experience.
What are the outcomes and how has it improved your business?
The rich application interface includes interactive drag-and-drop capabilities and real-time data responsiveness. The customised methodology implemented benefited the design and development stages, allowing each phase to progress quite quickly.
What are your plans for the future?
The next generation of the web is marked by dynamic, interactive, open and highly flexible applications that go beyond the capabilities of classic web applications. Therefore we will aspire to adopt new emerging techniques and technologies for building rich web applications. If the application began trading, a secure management system would need to be developed to manage the products, payments and user accounts. The web is becoming more powerful with a greater demand for wireless and mobile access. A next generation mobile application using various design approaches could also be developed.
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