Lifestyle Night.bg We developed feature-rich mobile applications with improved urban navigation for all attendees of “Night of the Museums and Galleries” — an annual 3-day festival in Plovdiv, Bulgaria.Provided ServicesServiceMobile DevelopmentQuality Assurance OPPORTUNITY Breathe Life into the Festival Experience for Every Visitor “Night of the Museums and Galleries” (Night.bg) engages guests from around the world in one of the most widely-attended cultural festivals in the heart of Bulgaria. It’s an immersive event that features various museums, galleriеs and creative studio work. Attracting a larger, younger audience each year, challenges the organizers to provide a facilitated customer experience that meets the needs and expectations of all attendees. SOLUTION A Mobile Platform App Tailored to Your Personal Program We built an upgraded mobile platform that allows users to plan their experience in the world of art and culture according to their interests. The application stores all scheduled activities, event descriptions, and location points so that any visitor can enjoy Night.bg to the fullest. The platform is split into three sections: Map, Program, and My Night. The latter helps create a personalized program with a list of a user’s favorite activities based on their preferences and interests. Another convenient function is the easy navigation to each festival event. Both the Map and Program pages also provide customized filters which allow for an easier and faster search of the information in demand. We introduced a notification function that sends a reminder to users 30 minutes before the start of every event that they add to their personal favorites in their program profile. “The support from MentorMate for Open Arts, an organization serving in the non-profit public sector, was of great importance. Thanks to their team of developers, the festival “Night” is currently one of the very few in Bulgaria with its own mobile application.” Vesselina Sarieva Director, Foundation “Open Arts” APPROACH Simple Use as a Core Concept A team of ten MentorMate developers worked on the mobile app to help ensure that each participant is given the freedom to experience “Night of the Museums and Galleries” without delays or worries. They built both iOS and Android versions. The two versions of the app offer a modern user-friendly design that complements its functionalities and eases customers’ experience. As part of the latest update, our team has renewed a number of elements in the mobile card to provide trouble-free navigation and integrate some of the latest trends in design. In writing the app’s code, we used Android Studio and XCode to integrate Google maps and Apple maps, while we also utilized Firebase for data storage. PROCESS Getting to Know the City While Verifying Location Data Localizing each point is made easy by placing markers on the mobile map using Google Maps. For the first version of Night.bg, our QA specialists in this project used real data for each location. They toured around Plovdiv and got to know the city by heart to ensure that the information on address proximity for each place included in the app is accurate. To verify that no small detail is left out for users, we presented them with different filterings, which help group location points based on a certain theme, date, or current proximity. “The mobile app provides the festival guests with an entirely different and wholesome point of view of more than 120 events, making it more accessible too. I believe that every person from the festival audience of about sixty thousand people appreciate MentorMate’s contribution to this success.” Vesselina Sarieva Director, Foundation “Open Arts” IMPACT Less Time for Planning, More Time for Art “Night of the Museums and Galleries” offers everything an art lover needs – a personalized program based on each person’s taste for culture; navigation to the various locations, where the events are hosted; a notification feed as well as facilitated and fast tracking of all the available information using different filters. All this, combined with the optimization of the previous version, saves time for users and grants everyone the flexibility to focus on their own personal experience. “I'm thankful that MentorMate is always looking for new solutions and creating new ways to provide the best experience for our festival's guests. Part of coming up with the best results was that all decisions in the development process with MentorMate were coordinated and agreed upon in a friendly and easy-to-access communication.” Vesselina Sarieva Director, Foundation “Open Arts”