Babele
A social innovation platform for accelerators and organizations
Overview
Babele helps accelerators and organizations manage socially impactful projects via a web platform, which offers a structured way for organizing people, ideas and resources, and methodologies. Core features include discussions, post feeds, notifications, progress tracking, business model collaboration, KPI tracking, and much more.
However, they had a major issue with UX. Long loading times and a poorly designed interface were turning users off. That’s when they approached us.
Objectives
- Improve user interface and experience
- Cut loading times to make interactions snappye
- Reduce the cost of adding new features
Client
Babele
Industry
Startups, Social Innovation
Location
EU
Tech Stack
ReactJS
TypeScript
Project challenges
To address the performance and interface issues, we redesigned and rebuilt the platform front end from scratch, evaluating and removing features that were no longer needed by users.
While this process of stripping back the functionality was challenging at times, the process resulted in a much leaner application, forming a foundation for UI/UX improvements.
Working within the limitations presented by the legacy back-end, we were still able to make significant performance gains, simply by optimizing the front-end.
Technical Overview
The core technologies we chose were React and Typescript - a choice primarily influenced by two major criteria: performance and ease of feature-set expansion.
We selected React as the foundation which led to a modular architecture that delivers high performance. TypeScript eliminated certain error classes and allowed our team of four to write consistent code.
For state management we used Redux, and for event streams RxJS. The combination of these two libraries makes state management a simple and modular process. The views are derived from Semantic UI and employ styled-components.
Outcome
Post-launch, Babele saw a significant reduction in bounce rate, directly related to the improved UI, and a substantial drop in load times. New feature development is now a realistic prospect, with customization costs much lower than for the previous platform.