ArtPrize Android & iOS Apps
ArtPrize
ArtPrize is running the world’s largest open, independent art competition.
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ArtPrize awards $500,000 in prizes to works of art selected by public vote and expert jury during a massive 19-day event. This requires a great deal of logistics, including mobile apps for 60,000 event-goers.
The ArtPrize app helps visitors find 170+ venues in the 3-square-mile ArtPrize district and vote for their favorite entries in real time. Atomic works with ArtPrize to update and improve their mobile app each year.
In past years, users could only register after they arrived in the ArtPrize district. This was difficult because the cell network is often overloaded during the event.
The team designed a new registration process. Users can now create an account and confirm their identity at any time. The final step of registration happens automatically when they enter the ArtPrize district during the event.
Jeff Wheeler, ArtPrize Director of Technology
Coordinating Stakeholders
The technology supporting their apartment residents was slow, outdated and fragmented; residents had to navigate multiple difficult to use apps for essential services like rent payments and maintenance requests.
Their new app would integrate multiple third-party apps into a single platform with native iOS and Android versions. It would let residents pay rent, request maintenance, RSVP to events, build community, connect with neighbors, and book amenities—all in one place. Neumann also had big ideas for future innovative app features, making a scalable app architecture essential for future expansion.
Ryder knew he needed a partner who could not only understand Flow’s vision for a single disruptive, community-centric living app, but also adeptly execute the technically demanding project on time. That’s when he knew he needed to be strategic about Flow’s next partnership to ensure it didn’t falter like the last ones.
Technical Specs
Atomic designed the system architecture and wrote software and firmware for:
Jeff Wheeler, ArtPrize Director of Technology
Phase 2: Developing a Full-feature Workshop Experience
With the Learning Map developed into a digital product, Root wanted to further help users dive into their organization’s strategy, financials, or processes with a second release. Among other features, they sought to create a kind of a virtual whiteboard, where everyone’s voice could be heard in a fun, engaging, and meaningful way.
Atomic’s Software Design Practice Lead in Ann Arbor, Bryan Elkus, led design work on the project. He saw the user experience of going through the Learning Map activities as a type of collaborative online challenge.
Under the guidance of Atomic's Software Consultant & Designer Bryan Elkus, the project emphasized collaborative user experiences, akin to an online group challenge, focusing on:
- Consultants facilitating onboarding, ice-breakers, and exercises.
- Client company employees engaging in organizational change.
Atomic Object Software Consultant & Developer Matt Soto his development work focused on delivering Root’s vision of polish, complex features, and emphasizing a business model around the digital product.
Root's VP, Nate Butki says Atomic’s consultative approach helped the project team uncover and address underlying needs rather than merely executing requests.
“Atomic didn’t want to just figure out what we wanted and give it to us—but rather figured out the need and helped us with it,” he said. “If they had listened to us and spit out exactly what we asked for, they would have only gotten 80 percent of it. Atomic’s team asked the questions and pushed us further.”
Technical Specs
Atomic designed the system architecture and wrote software and firmware for:
Jeff Wheeler, ArtPrize Director of Technology
Voting Infrastructure Upgrade
Atomic overhauled the app’s voting system. Many ArtPrize venues have poor cell reception, especially when thousands of voters are competing for bandwidth. To solve this, the app stores votes until the user’s phone gets an internet connection.
In past years, data syncing was buggy and would sometimes return errors, delay voting, or display votes incorrectly. It also had trouble syncing votes cast using different methods.
Atomic restructured the entire voting infrastructure — creating a simpler, more reliable system. Thanks to the new approach, votes cast via the mobile app rose from 65% of all votes to 75% after the upgrade.
Stability Improvements
The Atomic team re-engineered the ArtPrize app code base, fixing persistent stability issues and adding geofencing, dynamic updating, and integrated navigation.
Phase 2: Developing a Full-feature Workshop Experience
With the Learning Map developed into a digital product, Root wanted to further help users dive into their organization’s strategy, financials, or processes with a second release. Among other features, they sought to create a kind of a virtual whiteboard, where everyone’s voice could be heard in a fun, engaging, and meaningful way.
Atomic’s Software Design Practice Lead in Ann Arbor, Bryan Elkus, led design work on the project. He saw the user experience of going through the Learning Map activities as a type of collaborative online challenge.
Under the guidance of Atomic's Software Consultant & Designer Bryan Elkus, the project emphasized collaborative user experiences, akin to an online group challenge, focusing on:
• Consultants facilitating onboarding, ice-breakers, and exercises.
• Client company employees engaging in organizational change.
Atomic Object Software Consultant & Developer Matt Soto his development work focused on delivering Root’s vision of polish, complex features, and emphasizing a business model around the digital product. Root's VP, Nate Butki says Atomic’s consultative approach helped the project team uncover and address underlying needs rather than merely executing requests.
“Atomic didn’t want to just figure out what we wanted and give it to us—but rather figured out the need and helped us with it,” he said. “If they had listened to us and spit out exactly what we asked for, they would have only gotten 80 percent of it. Atomic’s team asked the questions and pushed us further.”
Nate Butki, Root VP
Taste-testing the Product in the Field
Delivering A Great Product and An Empowered Team
By getting to share their decades’ experience with agile practices, Atomic’s team got to watch the counterparts at Root develop new skills over the course of the second engagement.
Soto says he loved watching Root’s inherently collaborative culture adopt the agible practices they were learning.
“After a few months, they loved how easy and smooth it was to make last-minute changes, to pivot in another direction, and use feedback to spend their time where it was most impactful,” he said.
Root’s Jared Page says the agile approach to product design, development, and management he saw during the engagement had a profound impact.
“One of my favorite things about this project is that everyone got better—better at our jobs and better with communication; it just feels cool,” he said. “Sometimes you work for a year and don’t know if you’ve improved but everyone could look back on this project and say they’ve improved. This project changed the way I will work forever.”
Trust and Versatility Drive Rapid App Development
Flow developers had an ongoing worry that working with a consultancy would bring a sub-par codebase, and Flow leadership knew that the app experience for their tenants needed to reflect the uncompromising standards of their brand.
With a clear roadmap, the team leveraged trust, delegation, and the versatility of Atomic’s generalist developers to meet the tight deadline.
“The degree of talent that Atomic brought to bear on the problem space helped them earn the respect and the trust of everybody at Flow pretty much overnight, which made it a lot easier to just delegate and let things go,” said Ryder.
While Flow had solid developers in specific tech stacks, Atomic’s developers’ generalist backgrounds allowed them to flex between front-end and back-end work across iOS, Android, and web platforms. This adaptability was crucial for rapid development, enabling Atoms to transition across teams, fill process gaps, ask insightful questions, and require less onboarding for different platforms.
Upon delivery, Flow had a high-fidelity, robust, and scalable app that’s grown into the future requirements cleanly.
One Flow senior iOS engineer remarked, "It’s the best codebase I’ve seen in ten years,” while Ryder added, “They took the time and leveraged their experience to do it right from the beginning despite the pressure of the timeline.”
Empowering Flow's Future: Building a Strong Internal Team
Beyond delivering the app, Ryder knew building a full-stack internal team was crucial for Flow's long-term success. Atomic helped Flow staff up, ensuring they were set for success post-engagement.
Unlike other vendors, the Atomic team handled application development with minimal oversight. Over the course of the project, this gave Flow the bandwidth to hire nearly 50 full-time employees.
At the same time, their developers directly benefited from working alongside Atomic consultants, building upon Atomic’s strong development culture through their onboarding to the codebase, detailed documentation, pair programming, and ongoing collaboration and feedback.
“Atomic worked to pre-disseminate their knowledge. Instead of holding onto it and protecting it as Atomic’s, they freely gave away what needed to be given away for us to accelerate and move. That’s kind of unheard of in a dev shop partner,” said Ryder.
Coordinating Stakeholders
A Partnership with a Storybook Ending
The team’s careful project management, client communication, cutting-edge architecture, and cohesive design strategy helped the team ship the product on time and on budget.
Reflecting back on the multi-year, high-profile project, Robinson said Atomic helped his company arrive at a special moment in time.
“We'd never done anything this big. Ever,” he said. “We’re live across all the major pillars Atomic said they would deliver on. It was delivered on time, on budget, to expectation, live. Not three or four milestones late with people leaving and the platform half-baked and full of bugs.”
StoryLoom began open-beta in December 2022. A global launch is scheduled for the spring of 2023.
“We’ve been given a rare opportunity," said Robinson, "to find success by chasing opportunities Starship Enterprise-style: going where people aren’t—pushing boundaries.”
Jeff Wheeler, ArtPrize Director of Technology
Atomic provided Android app development and iOS app development for the ArtPrize mobile apps. Conduit Studio provided visual design and information architecture on the project.
The Atomic Team
Here are some of our current Atoms who worked on this project. Click their photo to read their bios!
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