My no-code journey to gamifying sustainability
How we promoted sustainable living within our technology team.
As with many good ideas it started over a beer, only for once in my career I could remember what the idea was the next day and actually followed through on it!
The beer, the idea
November 2019 — remember those pre-COVID days?
My boss, Matt, and I had just finished two days at a conference. Low-code and no-code development platforms had received quite a bit of session airtime. It was being pitched as one of the next big things for enabling even greater and more rapid innovation.
Matt was telling me about his new role on the ITV Green Team. He’d just had a stern word with our conference host about the abundance of single use plastic water bottles that were scattered about the conference hall.
I was pleased to hear that ITV was taking sustainability seriously and the Green Team sounded interesting. We started talking about what we could be doing within Technology to start raising awareness about climate change and what in technology we could do to make a difference.
I suggested we look at gamification and assumed there must be an app for that. Turns out there isn’t, or at least not one that’s any good.
So we decided we should build one!
Picking the platform
The following week I started researching No-Code platforms to develop our sustainability app.
There’s a huge amount of choice and I knew that picking the right platform was key, so I thought about my requirements; first stop, my own technical ability! I’ve been in IT for almost 20 years and most of my family and peers regard me as technical, but the reality is, I’m not. Or at least not anymore.
Sure, I can upgrade a friend’s decrepit PC to Windows 10 or give an old Mac a new lease of life by installing a SSD. I’m good at making it appear that I’m more technical than I really am, but I’ve not written code for about 15 years.
I initially looked at App Maker, Google’s attempt at providing a Low-Code development platform. It seemed the obvious place to start given ITV uses the G-Suite ecosystem, but honestly, I struggled!
After some more digging what became clear is that Low-Code is aimed at developers and sets out to ‘turbo charge’ development. Quickly realising it wasn’t for me, I moved from Low-Code to No-Code platforms.
I needed a platform that was easy to adopt, yet provided enough flexibility to develop a good looking mobile app, with a simple spreadsheet as its backend.
I came up with three simple requirements:
- The application development environment must be intuitive and easy to learn, with a good amount of documentation and ideally an active developer community.
- The application data must not require database experience: ideally it should be possible to host in Google Sheets.
- The platform should ideally provide a free tier to start with, and then offer some form of “pay as you grow” model.
After a few more days scouring the Internet, reading various “Top 10 No-Code Apps of 2019” articles and blog posts I came across Glide.
It ticked all the boxes: it is built on Google Sheets as its data source, it has an intuitive user interface, and most importantly it has a free tier. It was time to see if Glide could deliver the functionality I needed to develop my app!
Developing my initial prototype
The first step was to familiarise myself with Glide.
When you go to the Glide website it inspires you with confidence immediately: “Create an app from a Google Sheet in five minutes, for free”. I scrolled down and watched the “Glide in 90 seconds” video.
I’m a “learning through doing” kind of person so I immediately signed up. I wanted to get stuck into the development interface as soon as possible.
Once you’re signed up, you’re presented with your account page and it prompts you to create an app and gives you a choice: Google Sheet or template.
The first thing to know about Glide is that to develop in Glide, you need a populated Google Sheet! It doesn’t need to be complete, you can add data later but you need data to start with. Although I wasn’t clear on exactly how the app was going to look yet, I was clear on what data I needed. So I set about creating my Google Sheet to act as the backend for the app.
Matt had already shared with me a simple spreadsheet for tracking sustainable things we could be doing as part of our day-to-day business. It was just a simple tracker, with carbon savings per item and a reference to public information behind the carbon saving data.
I took the tracker concept and I built on that. I came up with a very simple initial data design:
- I needed user data so I knew who my “game” participants were
- I needed a set of sustainable solutions to pick from
- I needed a means of tracking each participant’s contribution for scoring purposes
That was it. It was that simple. It didn’t take me more than five minutes to create the Google Sheet and populate it with some sample data from the spreadsheet that Matt had shared with me.
I went back to Glide, clicked “Create App” and selected my Google Sheet.
Within a few seconds I was presented with the Glide developer interface. A mobile phone screen in the middle, with my Google Sheet data being presented back to me, not necessarily in the right way just yet, but it wasn’t far off.
Glide had built the app interface in a way that made sense, based on the types of data in the Google Sheet. It wasn’t quite right but I could immediately see what I needed to do to make it look and work better. What’s more, the various buttons and widgets on the left and the right side of the mobile phone didn’t look too daunting. It didn’t take me long to explore the layout, tabs and data screens and start familiarising myself with the content in each of these.
Within an hour I learnt the basics of Glide, playing around with the different app layouts and looking at the different components available. Within a few hours, I had a usable prototype that I shared with Matt. Best of all, it hadn’t cost me anything more than a few hours of my time.
And this is where the magic started to happen!
Rapid iteration to get to MVP
I had an app that worked. It didn’t look amazing yet, it didn’t even have a great name, but it was functional and it was in the hands of my boss, who was amazed at how quickly I’d turned something around.
Most importantly he could use it and show it to the rest of the Green Team and start thinking about other possibilities and opportunities.
I presented what I’d developed in a Green Team meeting, and we talked about how we could make the app relevant for everyone in Group Technology. We decided that just tracking the things we could be doing from a business perspective might be limiting for some people, so we decided to refocus the app on what we could all be doing in our personal lives.
A few days later Matt pinged me with a list of 50 things we could be doing at home to be more sustainable. He had also had a brainwave to make it more fun by theming it around an ITV series.
Over the next few weeks in my spare time I developed our very own sustainability handbook App for ITV Technology, complete with logo. We had a selection of characters from the TV show that colleagues could choose as their profile picture, and a list of 50 sustainability ‘tips’ to pick from.
Voila!
The amazing thing about this part of the process was the rapid iterative development that the Glide platform enabled. Matt and I didn’t suddenly come up with all the things we needed to do in one go, it was much more gradual and organic. I would take an idea, implement it, playback and that would then spark another idea, or a small tweak. The turnaround time for each change was incredibly fast!
We were finally ready to launch the ITV Technology Sustainability App with the rest of Group Technology.
Launching my app
Over the next few weeks we tested the app with the ITV Technology Green Team. We started to communicate that the app was coming and I presented the Glide platform and my app at a show and tell session with colleagues.
And that was it, we had gamified sustainable living! You sign into the app, read the tips on sustainability and implement them in your life. Whoever completes a tip gets a Green Point, and the person with the most points wins a prize!
Feedback on the app was positive, there were minor improvements that I kept making, even after the app was published and in use. But as the app was live I needed to be careful not to break it. Any change you make to a published app in Glide is instantly live.
Meanwhile Matt and the wider ITV Green Team were making plans for the main launch.
At this stage I was still using the free version of Glide, but I was conscious that with a quota of only 500 rows of data in the free tier it wouldn’t get us much further.
We finally launched our sustainability app on 17th June and started watching the number of users go up and the Green Points start rolling in.
Then, at a Group Technology Town Hall a week later, I joined a guest panel to talk about all of the things we’re doing at ITV to tackle the climate change crisis. We really pushed using the app and we asked everyone to install it on their phones there and then. The response was so great that I had to get the credit card out and upgrade to Glide Pro before the Town Hall had finished to avoid hitting the data limit.
Over the one month duration that we gamified sustainability in Group Technology we amassed a total of 530 Green Points, with the winner achieving 37 points out of the 50 available! But it wasn’t really about an individual winner — the actual winners were all who participated, as everyone learnt something new and applied it to their everyday lives!
What’s next for my app?
We have some exciting plans. We’re looking at an ITV wide rollout and we’ll work with ITV Creative to develop the next iteration of our No-Code starter for ten.
Beyond that we might even decide to launch externally so that other companies can use it to gamify sustainability in their own organisations.
If we decide to go beyond ITV we’ll look at options for the platform. I hope that Glide still features as part of our future plans for the app but either way, I’m pretty sure that regardless of the technology, there’s a real future for No-Code platforms and real opportunity for it to be used to change the way we work at ITV.
Could anyone build a mobile app in Glide?
Glide is so intuitive that anyone could pick it up in minutes.
All you need is a basic appreciation of mobile app design, and an understanding of data and relationships between data. So if you’ve ever used a mobile app and you have a reasonable grasp of Excel this development environment is for you!
Here are some of the key features that I think make Glide a great first step for anyone interested in developing their own No-Code mobile app.
- Glide is mobile first and designed to work with Google Sheets.
- Glide automatically creates an initial app layout based on your data.
- Glide has a really simple and intuitive user interface. What you see is what you get.
- Glide is very flexible and easy to customise to your requirements.
- Glide is easy to publish to users with a link or QR code. No need for App Stores.
- Glide is free for unlimited apps and users up to 500 rows of data per app.
- Glide has a great community forum where you can ask questions if you get stuck.
- Glide is delivering new features every week.
Whilst Glide is definitely not the most advanced or powerful No-Code platform out there on the market today, it does provide a much easier entry point than any other platform I’ve looked at.
I am certainly interested to see where this ambitious company whose mission is to create a billion new software developers by 2030 takes their innovative product next.
If you’d like to find out more about No-Code and how to build a mobile app in Glide, you’ll find me on Slack @marcwalf.
