Al-Ittihad

Client

Al-Ittihad

Disciplines Used

Digital Intelligence + Strategy, User Experience Design, Mobile Engineering, Web Engineering, SpecialOps and LiveOps

Services Provided

Engineering Strategy, Persona Development, Product Roadmapping, User Experience Strategy, Concept Development, Information Architecture, Information Design, Interaction Design, User Interface Design, Visual Design, Wireframe Prototyping Analytics + Reporting, API + SDK Development, Back-end Architecture, Deployment Strategy, Middleware Solutions, Web App Development, iOS Engineering, QA Test Plans, Regression Testing, Server Development, Technical Architecture, WatchOS Engineering

Project Details

CemtrexLabs worked closely with Abu Dhabi Media Group’s (ADMG) Al-Ittihad newspaper, to create an app to coincide with the Apple Watches (Gen.1) UAE launch. Apple Watch apps are powered and controlled by their iPhone counterparts and as Al-Ittihad needed one developed in the same time frame as well. With only 4 weeks until the watch launched, CemtrexLabs devoted all available senior resources to ensure ADMG’s vision.

Working closely with our counterparts at Advance.ae (ADMG’s newly formed digital agency) CemtrexLabs worked extended hours around the clock to quickly execute our Discovery + Preliminary Design Phase, beginning with a rapid use case and persona creation followed by rapid hi-fidelity wireframe prototype creation.

Through our Discovery + Preliminary Design Phase we created an experience that leverages natural and organic multi-touch controls for navigation; paired with PUSH notifications that are controlled with an intuitive experimental mechanism. When integrated together, delivers the news of interest to the user. We began to code the experience, while simultaneously refining and enhancing it during our SpecialOps Design + Engineering Sprints.

Building Upon and accentuating the experience of the iPhone app, the Apple Watch app served as a mechanism for delivery of rich notifications, as well as, the consumption of top news headlines according to the user’s indicated preferences.

From a technical architecture standpoint, the app was written with Symfony 2 PHP and leverages MongoDB for its database. This is served by Apache 2 from Amazon Web Services.