We use Empathy Maps to synthesize research data in order to better understand the users. Empathy Maps are great for creating personas and identifying users with different mindsets.

Apart from putting massive effort on functional user experience, we also help startup craft emotionally resonant, playful and game-like digital product experiences.

It’s no little known fact that web traffic globally is predominantly mobile based, as such NetEngine has a team of experts who excel in various forms of mobile development. The standards for mobile app development is ever evolving, we ensure our mobile apps are up to date and comply with the Apple and Android store requirements.

Having produced a number of standalone mobile apps we are well versed in app store processes for both IOS and Android.

When starting a new project the goal is to produce a product that is a valid proof of concept. We assist new clients establish the Minimal Viable Product (MVP), these are the foundations of an application. A minimum viable product (MVP) is not always a smaller/cheaper version of your final product. Defining the goal for an MVP can save you tonnes of time, money and grief.

Next goal is the MMP Minimal Marketable Product, essentially the pretty version of an MVP. This is the model of the application you want to show to prospective investors and gauge interest in the product.

We work with react Native for stand alone mobile apps to ensure that we can develop once, and deploy twice. React Native also allows us to work in a very similar environment than standard web applications making for fast, effective and very malleable web software

Ooo progressive! These apps are between a mobile and web application and are a great way to get all of the advantages of web development (like no down time, no version control, easy iteration and access everywhere) with the advantages of installed applications, from notifications on a users phone to the ever-precious ‘phone real estate’

Having played with a few different front-end frameworks, we’ve, as a team settled on React and have been using it for the past few years. What we love most about React is, it’s massive support, continual and steady growth for new tools making it easier and faster to develop with as well as the massive amount of libraries so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel, to build you your new car.

Unsurprisingly, in our opinion, Ruby (and Rails) is the best way to build web applications. Your project will go further, faster. The Ruby community has an extreme focus on best practices, testing and object oriented design, constantly evolving and pushing the state of the art forward.

For startups or cost effective projects we prefer Ruby on Rails (RoR) for the back end. RoR is a framework specifically built for getting up and running quickly. This allows us to take your project from nothing to something very quickly without sacrificing stability for maintainability.

We use JS Node for most of our new projects which need more customisation than RoR lends itself too as well as small projects which are largely process driven. We love to use it for small Lambda applets or microservices and think it’s a fantastic technology with growing popularity.

Across our team we also have multiple team members familiar with a variety of other languages that we’re comfortable with such as .Net, PHP, Go and Python. That being said we do find that their niches are better covered by the tools above and will most often use these languages only to take on existing, pre-established projects

Analytics

Generally we recommend trusty Google Analytics for web applications and Firebase for mobile apps. These tools add so much value to the direction of your business providing clear guidance around your audience engagement and disengagement. They’re easy to implement, don’t hog resources and most importantly, even those who aren’t technologically inclined can get around Google Analytics to get a basic understanding of User Behaviour throughout your application.

We test for visual effects, compatibility with different browsers, and usability across all devices. Monitoring and automated testing tools we tend to use are: Bugsnag, Code climate, Rubocop, Brakeman Security testing, Circle CI code based testing

Our preferred hosting platform is AWS. It’s well priced, phenomenally reliable and is considered top tier for security. We also utilise Heroku to get up and running quickly during testing which also sits on the AWS architecture.

That being said, we’ve been lucky enough to work with some great Brisbane-based hosting providers as well as on-site environments where our clients require it.

Naturally as software developers we take security and privacy very seriously. We consider this a vital and natural part of each and every project we’re involved with. We endeavour to support you to make good decisions with how and to what degree to implement security in your project.

Our first approach to good security is to ensure that our hosting is stable, secure, certified and appropriately recognised. We use AWS which are renowned for going the extra mile in security both from a physical protection and backup perspective as well as technical and software perspective.

We use a variety of tools (these are often language specific) to ensure that each and every change to your software is secure against the OWAPS top 10.

Often each language has a well defined set of guidelines in how to defend against the most common attack vectors and avoid pitfalls, we ensure that we’re familiar with each of these and stay up to date with them as they shift, change and grow over time.