Low-code development platform
Project overview
SmartGuide® is a low-code development platform for building better applications in record time. It was developed to address the following challenges facing public sector organizations:
- Citizens and businesses expect government agencies to deliver services that are on par with the private sector
- Budget cuts are forcing small and large agencies alike to do more with less
- A shortage of in-house IT resources is slowing the digital transformation of many departments and agencies
My roles
- Research — Generated new product ideas based on client, partner and employee feedback, competitive intelligence and by eating own dog food.
- Design — Designed the UI and UX, always with an eye towards making the platform easy to use and accessible to less technical users.
- Development — Coded the front end of the platform as well as responsive and WCAG 2.0 AA accessible templates for customers based on Bootstrap and Materialize. Wrote user stories and collaborated closely with developers to turn the product vision into reality.
- Launch — Created the company's website. Prepared marketing collateral including blog posts, product datasheets, solution briefs, press releases, whitepapers and case studies. Created self-service demos and wrote demo scripts for the sales team. Wrote end-user documentation, defined the training courses and led interactive workshops.
The results
By positioning SmartGuide as the fastest way to build applications with limited technical resources, and by prioritizing development tasks that strengthened that positioning, I helped the company beat out bigger competitors and find a niche in a crowded marketplace.
- Guided the development of the product through 7 major versions
- Over 250 implementations including high-traffic citizen-facing government portals
- 15 million transactions processed (and counting)
- Clients experienced up to 97.5% lower service delivery costs
- 10x faster to develop applications compared to traditional methods
“An e-government service can now be put online in days rather than weeks. The numbers speak for themselves.”
Gilles Lassarre
Head of French eGovernment projects
WYSIWYG development
A web-based interface allows subject matter experts to visually assemble responsive applications, portals and chatbots.
1-click app creation
To help kickstart the development process, application fields can be auto-created when uploading PDF forms and XML schemas and when connecting to web services and extension functions.
Visual page branching
A visual development environment helps non-technical people participate in the application building process, for instance to create multi-step forms with advanced skip logic without any coding.Point-and-click functions
A slew of built-in functions enable citizen developers to easily perform operations such as string manipulations, calculations and date comparisons. Even compound functions and complex formulas are natively supported.
PDF prefilling
SmartGuide can prefill PDF forms with collected data, without any coding. This allows breaking down complex forms into a series of logical steps to simplify data collection while still displaying the completed form in a PDF for pixel-perfect printing or archiving.Zero-code integration
SmartGuide natively supports SOAP and REST web services, including OData. Either uploading a WSDL file or providing a sample call is all that is required to create a connection that can be reused across multiple applications.
