March 2020

Two Weeks in March

At the beginning of what turned out to be a multi-year global pandemic, we decided to build Hilfma. One Monday in March, we had the idea for the app. Two weeks later, the app was available on the app stores for both iOS and Android. In retrospect, it was a pretty crazy time. This timeline tries to convey it as best as possible, but it was a lot more fluid in reality.

With the idea slowly taking form, we started to outline the project on paper and tried to solve the fundamental question: How could we digitize the note in the hallway? This question includes more finesse than it seems because the simple note offering help isn’t simple. Who is the target group, who offers the support, and who is the recipient? What assistance is provided, when do people help, and in what area do people help each other? Is the target group of the people who want to receive help even able to use a digital solution?

In this phase, we decided on the key features for the release version, and we had to keep a couple of ideas on hold. The app’s premise was simple: Connect the people who want to help with simple tasks like going to the grocery store or the pharmacy with the people in need of assistance in their area. And vice versa. But even this simple process isn’t without complicated questions, especially when it comes to privacy and data protection concerns, but also parameters like the vicinity of the users or if people can request help for others, like family members living in other cities. Around this time, we came up with the name Hilfma.

The next step was to start programming the basic data models for the app and include all the necessary functions. First, we had to create a database system that keeps track of all orders and the order’s location. Since a big focus of the app was helping older people with their groceries, we needed a way for them to add orders too. We already knew how hard it is to create a UX used by younger people, but for technologically inexperienced elderlies, it seemed like an almost impossible task – especially since some may not even own a smartphone. So, we decided to make it possible to give an order based on your current location or create an order based on a foreign location, e.g., if you want to get help for your grandmother. That way, we moved the user from people that might struggle with the app to younger, more tech affine users. During this, we realized that an inbuilt chat function would have been beyond the scope of this app, so we opted to pair the users together through WhatsApp. Once we saw everything worked as we hoped expected, the final development phase started.

At the same time, our good friend and one-person design studio Dominik Rummerstorfer created the design and the visual feeling for Hilfma. We aimed for a very streamlined yet comfortable and trustworthy design. With stylized elements like the shopping bag, which became the logo of Hilfma, or the sketched characters of both helpers and helped, the design of the app itself tells the story of helping others. This allowed us to create a caring environment in our app, where people genuinely look after each other.
The user experience had to be as accessible as possible since the people who needed help the most might not have a lot of experience using apps or smartphones. We reduced the necessary steps for both requests and proposals to the absolute minimum and kept texts and structure concise and straightforward. Big headlines with exact wordings, short and accurate descriptions, and no distractions at all in an effortless yet friendly design led to low-threshold usability. The cooperation with Dominik and our knowledge in building interfaces that everybody understands should prove very valuable in the future.

After finishing the basic data models and the user interface, we coded the whole application day and night. It took us a lot of coffee and a few night shifts - especially getting the notifications to work correctly, but we finished the final programming after just about four days.

Another 3 Weeks

Hello World

A released app isn’t worth a lot when nobody knows about it. Once Hilfma was online, we have pulled all the stops to make the app known to a broader public because Hilfma could only work if enough people who needed help and people who wanted to help learned about it. From the very beginning, we had tremendous success spreading the word about HILFMA among the many neighborhood support groups on social media. The people in these groups actively looked for a way to help and quickly became multiplicators for our app. For example, to make Hilfma known in all municipalities in Austria, we contacted all (!) mayors in Austria, which is about 2,100 calls and emails.

Friends in other cities and volunteers who could identify with this cause helped where they could. They distributed flyers in almost all cities in Austria, translated the app into six languages, and made all kinds of waves on social media. Thank you!

It wasn’t long until Hilfma got some media coverage in pretty cool places, like Der Standard or FM4. We were in the news! Quite some people found our app this way, and it continued to grow faster than we imagined. Looking back, these were exciting times because we were on everyone’s lips, and we had all the momentum in the world.

And, of course, we did “real life” help ourselves. We used Hilfma a lot, and being able to help people, seeing how they appreciated it and how they were genuinely happy in a hard time like this, was incredibly satisfying. We did this with an app.

You have a great idea. We have the means to make it real. Let’s talk about it: no pitch, no nonsense, no strings attached.

Final Sprint

Support your locals

Once the app got some traction and media coverage, we started to develop another feature because we realized a need during the first weeks of the pandemic: local service providers, small shops, and businesses had to stay closed. Hilfma was already all about helping the people near you, so the step to helping local businesses by giving them a platform wasn’t a big one. We aimed to let people connect with places to do their eco-friendly groceries or just enjoy a warm coffee (to go). Places they might not know were right in front of them in their neighborhood.

Thus we had to develop a way for local businesses to create and maintain a profile in our app. Since we had a lot of experience with company profiles from our web app timebite, we already had a plan to get going. At first, we created a straightforward way for the companies to create and edit their descriptions, upload, render pictures, and give their profiles a name. Then, to match the company’s location with the user location, we needed a service that receives the location’s name and returns the latitude and longitude. In the beginning, we opted for OpenStreetMaps, since it was free and open source. However, after many businesses could not find their address (because sometimes they were in the middle of nowhere), we switched to Google Places. Lastly, we created a flow for us to approve changes in a company profile. Whenever a change occurred, we made a call to the Trello API to create a new card in our Hilfma board. As soon as we saw the card, we had an admin profile where we could view the change and approve it, which made it show up in the app, or disapprove it, which sent an email to the owner with a description of why it was not approved. This way, we also helped companies to have a visually appealing profile. We got the inspiration for this cycle from the apple store, even though it was annoying for us in the beginning stages of the app.

With Hilfma getting a lot of attention and many active users, the local shop feature was received very well. Two weeks after releasing it, we had over 500 shops presented in the app.