Girl runs happily into new home filled with boxes, followed by parents carrying boxes
TWO MEN AND A TRUCK®

Movetrac® App For Organizing Moves

Our friends at TWO MEN AND A TRUCK wanted to take some of the stress out of moving by providing a free app to help people organize their move. With over 30 years experience in executing stress-free moves for customers, TWO MEN AND A TRUCK was uniquely suited to help bring order to this often chaotic process. 

Users receive a personalized to-do list filled with tasks, activities and helpful tips. Though the app is valuable for anyone who is moving, users who hire TWO MEN AND A TRUCK get extra help with planning and scheduling. RDG built an app for mobile and desktop browsers using React, and a serverless GraphQL backend for storing data and connecting to TWO MEN AND A TRUCK’s internal systems.

Movetrac

Services

Front-end Development
Back-end Development
Design
Accessibility
Integration

React

Gatsby

Project Brief

For TWO MEN AND A TRUCK, the movetrac® app is part of a larger initiative to create a more direct line of communication with their customers. They wanted to leverage technology to increase the average conversion rates for all stages of the customer journey. Movetrac® would be positioned at the forefront of a channel-agnostic communication platform for engaging both potential and existing customers. Therefore, movetrac® needed to integrate with existing communication channels. Since movetrac® was also designed for engaging existing customers, it needed to integrate with TWO MEN AND A TRUCK’s internal business systems.

diagram of movetrac entity relationships without labels

What We Did

We began with the business requirements for the project and reviewed the desired outcomes that TWO MEN AND A TRUCK defined. This project was part of a long term strategy to improve every aspect of the customer's digital experience, so we worked collaboratively with the team at TWO MEN AND A TRUCK to align this project with that overarching goal. Out of these discussions, we fine-tuned the design and technical details of the project and also also planned a related mini-app for TWO MEN AND A TRUCK's main site.

With a clear set of project goals, we set out to define the minimum requirements for launching a successful app. These minimum requirements helped us establish development priorities and launch the app quickly, while allowing user feedback to influence development of additional features.

Challenge

App experience within the browser

Solution

React frontend

With a modern Javascript frontend like React, we are able to put all our functionality to a single page. No page reloads, no navigation changes.
Challenge

Scalable backend with diverse API integration

Solution

Serverless Apollo Server on AWS Lambda

Using Apollo Server means we were able to stitch together various underlying APIs into a single, cohesive interface for the rest of the app. Using AWS Lambda means no one would worry about infrastructure.
Challenge

Easy updates to marketing resources

Solution

Markdown and Continuous Integration

Going with markdown means that non-technical users could make updates without learning HTML. Having continuous integration means their updates can go live without needing assistance from engineers.

User Interface

With an idea of the minimum launch features, we began drafting the app workflow and user interface with wireframes. These wireframes helped us reason through what data should be shown where, as well as the general steps users go through when using the app.

Movetrac Checklist Wireframe
Movetrac Checklist Wireframe
Movetrac Booking Wireframe

Technologies

Parallel to our work on wireframes, we began working through the requirements for the technical stack. We wanted to determine the technologies that would enable us to accomplish this project's goals. We identified that there would be a dynamic nature of the interactions within the app. These dynamic interactions led us to see the frontend of the app as being a dynamic JavaScript app. Our JavaScript framework of choice is React. Employing React in this project allowed us to build the UI with abstract ideas like modals and sidebars, rather than lower-level ideas like markup and DOM manipulation.

On the backend side of the technical stack, we chose a serverless architecture that would scale to match the usage of the app. Additionally, with the majority of the backend functionality being integrations with other APIs, we chose Apollo Server to power our app's own API.

map of movetrac technology stacks and relationships

Marketing Site

When it came time to build the marketing landing pages for movetrac®, we wanted to carry over the design work we did in React. So we chose to use Gatsby as it allowed us to build a static site without the need to create styles from the ground up. One additional requirement of the marketing site was the ability for non-technical users to update the articles. So we utilized Gatsby's ability to compile Markdown into HTML and put a continuous integration process in place to rebuild the site each time an editor committed changes to the Markdown files under version control.

homepage view of movetrac marketing website
movetrac app screenshot
movetrac mobile app screenshot