Pay The Hippo
Redesign, rebranding and development of a fine box app for teams
Introduction
In 2020 we joined forces with the original creators of the widely popular mobile app, Pay The Hippo to form a new direction for the app. We have created a brand new mobile application and have taken over the entire operation from the previous creators, and have plans of expanding the app to more markets and countries in the future.
Context
First launched 10 years ago, Pay The Hippo has captured the need in sport clubs for an app to manage the culture of assigning fines to members for all sorts of reasons, in the manner of dinner, activities and parties. Having been early to the market, the app has caught on to be the popular choice throughout Scandinavia.
Design challenges
The goal of the project was to create a complete redesign with a user interface that follows modern standards for app design. We wanted to respect the original user and keep the same conventions that the users are familiar with in the old app.
Development challenges
For the new app, we had ambition to develop more features than the old backend was able to support. The challenge, however, was that we did not have access to either the old backend or the database. Different solution was discussed, however one of the issues was that we would need to migrate all the old users in order to completely change to a new database. The solution we ended up with was creating a proxy backend, which would ask the old backend for information about the user, if we didn’t have it stored on the new server. For any further requests, the data would simply be fetched from our own servers and in some time the old backend and database can simply be shut down.