Equiloco

Customer

Equiloco is a Danish company headquartered in Fredensborg, Denmark, which offers online platform for horse owners, trainers, and veterinarians, both in Denmark and abroad. The vision of Equiloco was to create a universe where it is necessary for both Danish and foreign enthusiasts and professionals to connect with a platform that, among other things offers user-friendly and smart training plans for horses.

The company has been founded by veterinarian Karsten Thuren Key. Karsten has worked several years at one of England's leading equine clinics, after which he worked as a veterinarian at Hørsholm Hestepraksis for several years. After that, he realized the dream of a mobile equine clinic and thus founded iKeyVet. Karsten has extensive experience with all specialties as an equine veterinarian, including surgery, and had long had the dream of developing a solution where it was possible to connect both horse owners, veterinarians, and trainers in a user-friendly and intuitive system.

Challenge

Karsten contacted us in his quest to develop and devise a completely new concept.  The goal was to develop an app where experts and owners could easily interact in different ways, and where training plans were served in a clear way.

Due to the quite different types of profiles that the app was intended for, it was important to differentiate the user journey in the app based on the users' background as either veterinarian, horse owner, rider or trainer. In addition, the idea was that horse owners should be able to create several horse profiles that could be tracked individually. Thus, users should be able to see detailed statistics for each individual horse, and owners should be able to publish horse profiles to other relevant users (e.g. trainer, rider and veterinarian), so that they too could follow the horse's development etc. User-friendliness was of course the highest priority for Karsten, and with the many features that were on the drawing board, it required a lot of thought from the very first workshop.

Solution

The design of the app was developed through a series of workshops and in ongoing dialogue with Equiloco.  The collaboration was thus kick-started with a planning phase where we first designed the rough sketches (wireframes) and user flows. The focus in this phase was to get all the functions conceived and visualized so that the user journey itself became intuitive for all types of users. As the user flow took shape, a technical solution specification was prepared and work on the visual identity began, including logo design, design style, font types and color themes. Once both the wireframes and identity were in place, the graphic design could be finalized.

The back end and the app server were developed in the framework Laravel, which is an open-source PHP framework that offers both great flexibility, stability, and security.  Laravel thus provides ample opportunities for integrations, and easy setup while being flexible and easy to further develop. In addition, development with Laravel is associated with lower development costs than for instance NET based frameworks. 

Front-end consists of Native apps for both iOS and Android, which among other things allows for optimization of battery consumption, which was important as the app's functionality is closely linked to, ongoing geo-location when the horse is trained, which can otherwise quickly drain the power.

Result

The user experience itself in the app is simple and intuitive, despite the many features, and the back-end offers the team behind Equiloco a wide range of tools for managing the system, content, users, etc.

The app's goal is to make life easier for both horse owners, trainers, riders and veterinarians, and the flow is thus centered on the individual horse. Progress is shared between the users associated with the individual horse, which makes it easy to continuously follow up on the training of the horses, health, etc. It is also possible to share videos, create appointments and chats, so owners, riders and experts can discuss and share insights from the training. Once a training program has been established, the app can assist by explaining and measuring whether the exercises are being performed correctly and then provide feedback and tips. This makes it easier to follow the plan that users have agreed on.In addition, a safety function has been implemented, intended for situations where a rider, for example, has been thrown off the horse. Thus, if a rider stops moving and at the same time is unable to call for help, Equiloco sends a geolocation text message via the Stay Safe function to the close contacts added by the user. The collaboration has been going on for several years and further development and operation are proceeding according to AGILE principles.