How We Built PostCo Bags from Nothing to Something in 6 Weeks
Being the largest parcel service network in Southeast Asia with over 2,500+ retail locations in Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam was not enough for the PostCo team. With the vision of empowering retail stores with services and bridging the ever growing online-offline gap, the team sat down and brainstormed other microservices that we can introduce to our retail partners.
What if we can use our network of locations for something else?
We’ve all had the hassle on our travels — to have to lug around a suitcase while sightseeing around town. Not very pleasant.
PostCo Bags was the result of our eagerness to innovate. We had set a goal of launching PostCo Bags on a six-week sprint. PostCo Bags is Malaysia’s first luggage storage service allowing for tourists to leave their bags at over 100 retail locations across three cities in Malaysia.
But this was not the only thing we were doing in that six-week. We were also in the midst of launching PostCo in Vietnam at the same time. So those i18n tickets thrown into the mix while our team of 4 engineers build something new.
And as a tech startup, nothing excites us more than building something new. But new doesn’t always mean good — and we didn’t want to force a hackathon style project on our customers.
So in that six weeks, we rotated our team based on expertise to build the back end, the UI/UX design, and the front end while keeping all wheels running with our core services in Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam.
The Back End
Our current business is to provide a convenient way to collect and return online purchases at nearby local stores instead of the post office. If we were to oversimplify what our app does, it would be this — it lets one party drop off a parcel at a location, and another party to come and pick it up.
Sure, we built verification systems and API interactions along the way, but they exist to support this main business logic.
What we realise early on was that we already have the back end for PostCo Bags. Because storing bags at a location is essentially — dropping off your bag at that location and then picking it up again. It’s our main business logic, except done by the same person!
One of the SOLID engineering principles is that software should be open for extension, but closed for modification. It felt like a beautiful accident that we had to do minimal back end design for this project.
The UI/UX Design
We had little time to do usability studies or a design sprints for this project. But we didn’t want to fall into the trap of designing for ourselves instead of our customers either. So we decided that the middle ground here is… to rely on assumptions and studies made by other applications!
One nugget of wisdom we learned from a UX designer friend is to design around the customer’s habits, and not force new ones with novel designs. New habits are awkward.
This is why online shopping apps end up having the same general layouts. Everyone wants to make it easy for the customers to shop.
For PostCo Bags, we want to make it as easy as possible for our customers to find locations near them. We want to make it a location based listing app. And when we think about well designed location based listing app, we all think of just one app. Airbnb.
A large map on the right, location information displayed on cards on the left, and a prominent search bar. That’s what our app will look like!
Don’t be novel, don’t force new habits to the customers.
The Front End
Front end development is where we spent most of our time on this project. Up till now, the PostCo app was built as a Ruby on Rails app with dashes of React JS sensibly sprinkled when needed.
For PostCo Bags, we wanted our customers to have as close an experience to Airbnb. As few new habits as possible, as our UX design credo for this project.
So we caved in and built it as a single-page application. That meant client side routing for quick transitions, global states living on the client, micro animations, and just bucket loads of Javascript.
We ended up spending four weeks building the front end — by far the heaviest part of the project. We knew we could afford this, having made the earlier decision to simplify the back end and UI/UX.
What We Learned
PostCo Bags is now available for our customers in Malaysia at https://postco.co/bags, and will soon be available to customers in Vietnam too. We’re pretty happy with the project. So much so that we have since reused its layout into the parcel returns booking platform on our app.
We now embrace constraints at PostCo. It would have been easier to simply throw hard work at the project and have it drag on. Constraining ourselves into a six week timeline forced us to see what is essential and trim down everything else. We have a firm believe that perfection is not possible but progress it.
“A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.” — General George Patton
It’s true what they say, sometimes perfection can get in the way of progress.
If you have an appetite for an interesting challenge and want to have a meaningful impact, come help us build cool things! 😎 We are hiring at https://postco.co/en-MY/careers!
