Building products around what EF Hutton’s users needed
Developing EF Hutton’s product around user behaviour and experience, including a maps application for local search and the APIs and search engine behind it.
- Client
- EF Hutton
- My role
- Senior Web Developer
- When
- 2017 – 2018
- Sector
- Finance and services
1 The problem
People need to find the right service or place quickly and trust what they see. The functionality had to be decided by what users needed and what the company could realistically offer.
2 What I learned about users
- Watching how users behaved showed which features they relied on and where they hesitated.
- People searching for a place or service have a clear intent and want routes, not just pins on a map.
- Local businesses wanted to be seen at the moment people were searching.
3 What I built or changed
- Developed the product and adapted it to user behaviour and user experience, with functionality decided by user needs and what the company could offer.
- Built a maps web application with multi-stop routing, service and place search, and custom banners for subscribed business owners.
- Designed RESTful APIs in Node.js and integrated several vendors’ APIs into a custom Zend PHP application, with data flowing into SuiteCRM.
- Set up a clustered C++ search engine across multiple servers, and moved a JavaScript application to Node.js.
- Worked in Agile/Kanban with Slack, Bitbucket and GitHub, alongside a consultant in another time zone.
4 The result
Search and maps features shaped around how users looked for places and services, with a paid placement model for business owners and the APIs and search infrastructure to support it.
- User behaviour analysis
- Maps and routing
- Local search
- Node.js
- REST APIs
- Zend PHP
- SuiteCRM
- C++ search cluster