When to rebuild, not refactor

How starting from scratch helped MoreThan’s app regain consumer trust

We rebuilt the car insurers’ app for young drivers, fixing its data issues and restoring consumer confidence for 75% less cost.

The Challenge

MoreThan’s SmartWheels App encourages young people to drive well by offering financial perks for good driving. The app works in conjunction with a car’s black box, which collects data on speed, distance and smoothness of driving, and feeds this back to the driver along with tips on how to improve. An ongoing challenge is keeping this incentive-based system enticing to users. And that’s even harder when assumptive, inaccurate tracking data was damaging consumer trust. How could we recover the app’s reliability, make it more engaging and regain consumer confidence as efficiently as possible?

Indiespring Action

Using our Springboard Development Framework, we analysed the existing app’s code quality, user experience, back history and integrations against MoreThan’s business goals. This showed that the app’s fundamental codebase was too shaky for further development. A complete overhaul would provide a much stronger foundation for future functionality, technical development and ‘maintainability’. Rebuilding the app’s language and framework would also make it more compatible with newer devices and operating systems over the long term. And a rebuild would give MoreThan the chance to deliver a mobile app which looked and felt completely different in order to reset their customer expectations after a series of poorly received updates.

We rebuilt Smart Wheels as a cross-platform app, which meant that one codebase could be deployed to both Android and iOS and that it was easier , cheaper and more efficient to maintain. Gone were the legacy app’s assumptive tracking routes which were eroding consumer trust. In its place was a frictionless customer experience with a cleaner design, whose data was generated from absolute points on a journey, so tracking was more accurate.
Working in two-week, agile ‘sprints’ from design to production and testing meant we could work nimbly and iteratively while maximising client feedback opportunities. The continuous sign off/ release cycle allowed us to produce a minimum viable product which was continuously built and improved upon without the risk of large-scale failure.
All of which helped drive More Than’s new app to success.

The Result

Rebuilding the app created a more seamless customer experience which could be sustained more easily into the future. And that boosted consumer confidence. In addition:

  • The new app cost MoreThan 75% less in maintenance fees due to moving away from costly Native Applications.
  • Our rebuild has pulled in 4.4 stars on the Play store – smashing the average one star industry benchmark