Le New Black
Le New Black
Global brands and retailers in one platform- Fashion /
- France /
- Start 2022
Mobile development, Technical support
Objective-C, C++
Senior iOS Developer
Le New Black is a B2B platform that connects global brands and retailers. Syndicode has been enhancing its iPad application with new features and providing on-demand technical support.
Since we began working on the project, the Le New Black application received, among all, a text recognition module, full-text live search, and a YouTube video automatic playback feature. Thanks to Syndicode, the app has improved its performance tremendously and stopped experiencing crash issues.
The app aims to simplify sales and order management. Brands can present their collections, take orders, and add retailers to the platform. The app helps track their sales performance with a built-in analytics tool. It automatically synchronizes with the brand’s account providing real-time information on items.
Retailers benefit from the app due to its convenient search and order placement features and powerful tracking system. The application can also work offline.
The client turned to Syndicode for the development of new features and stable on-demand support for the existing application. They wanted to delegate the technical issues and fully focus on the business side of the project.
The Le New Black platform houses over 300 brands, each having hundreds of items in stock. Searching across this volume of data used to take a long time, especially with filters applied. This frustrated customers and interfered with inviting new clients into the platform.
Syndicode engineers implemented a real-time asynchronous client-side search engine using C++. With it, the app can conduct a full-text search through thousands of products. Then we further boosted the system’s performance with a lock-free live search algorithm. Now a user gets their search result in the blink of an eye and can review all the items somehow related to their search query.
If a user wanted to shop in different categories, they had to search for them separately. Then they should visit individual product pages and select the sizes and colors. This was time-consuming and impacted the user experience. At the same time, standard iOS controls didn’t allow creating a complex order form.
We made a custom control for creating an order table. It works similarly to the default UICollectionView element but can manage large amounts of data without harming the app’s performance. Now, the user can review all the items in the specified category or a brand, filter them, and select the number of products of a certain type, color, size, etc. All the information is displayed in a single table, and the user can complete their purchase in a minimum of steps. This way, we made the most out of the iPad’s screen space and improved UX tremendously.
Features
We built a custom module that uses Google Cloud Natural Language AI and OpenCV library to scan text and extract certain data.
Instead of manually adding retailers to the platforms, app users can scan business cards with their devices. Our module enables the app to read the card owner’s name, their company name, address, and contact information.
Le New Black app users can embed videos from the top popular sharing platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, and DailyMotion.
YouTube is very popular among Le New Black users but it prohibits direct video integration at the code level. The Syndicode engineers came up with a creative way to get around this issue and made a player that starts/pauses video automatically and matches the app’s aesthetics.
Thanks to our solution, the user can review all the items that are somehow associated with the phrase they typed in the search field.
A smart algorithm prioritizes items based on their relevance to the search query. This way, a user doesn’t have to remember the searched item’s exact name or ID. They can also search for products from a certain vendor or of a specific type, style, etc.
Since we started introducing new features, we’ve been performing thorough testing to ensure they integrate smoothly into the existing app structure and work as intended. Apart from that, we do scheduled checkups to see that the application works in line with the newest Apple updates.
Our engineer started work on the project from the app audit and fixed the identified bugs and code inconsistencies. As a result, the application became more stable Our engineer started work on the project from the app audit and fixed the identified bugs and code inconsistencies. As a result, the application became more stable.
As of this writing, we developed a new UX-centered approach to app navigation. We also simplified the process of product search and order for the user by increasing the information density on a screen and eliminating the multi-step routine. The Syndicode engineer rewrote the search feature to make its code lightweight and help it execute faster. Additionally, we carried out a new way of order composing based on catalogs, added more information to the product page, including the video embedding feature, and implemented a business card scanner.
Since Syndicode started working, the iPad app’s quality reached 99% crash-free users. Currently, over 300 brands and around 10,000 retailers are the happy clients of Le New Black. We continue providing support and development services, regularly releasing new features and improving the app’s performance.
“ Thanks to Syndicode, the application is now more robust and reliable. The response time is faster, and we are satisfied with their high-quality code…”
