The Story

After investing significant capital and losing almost a year in attempting to launch its product, Patent Safari was losing confidence in its development team and sought out Freshout to get the job done. We first performed a code review, assessing the current state of the application's code base for proper system architecture, security vulnerabilities, scalability and flexibility considerations, incorporation of automated tests, and general compliance with development best practices. Our findings clearly signaled that in order to build a scalable and secure application, we'd need to scrap almost everything and start from scratch.

Since bringing the product to market was urgent at this point, we worked closely with the client to scale back the feature set and focus on reaching the minimum viable product (MVP) asap. The application's feature set, although paired back, directly solved a growing problem in the market - being able to track and manage patent reexaminations, and receive timely alerts about updates and status changes. In addition to tracking specific patents and their reexaminations, subscribers could also share patents and reexams, add docket notes, and download the most recent reexam document right from the application. After defining a dramatically reduced scope for the first iteration of the project, we got to work designing a streamlined backend system and wireframes of every page and instance to establish the workflow processes and information architecture of the user interface.

The key component that would make the product a success relied upon its ability to automate gathering updated information on patent reexaminations from a trusted source - easier said than done. For this we needed to implement a seamless and highly efficient integration with a third-party application that would be the bridge to accessing the needed data. There were many technical hurdles, to say the least, but we worked through the problems one by one and found the best possible solutions. We also placed a strong emphasis on creating a simple, intuitive user experience so that the application's functionality would be easy to understand and use - this was very important given the age and characteristics of the target audience.

We completed the project in under eight weeks, and after recently launching the application the client has already received rave reviews from industry professionals and target customers. We're now planning for the second version of the product to make it even better.