work
Making sure that your phone or tablet never dies, MobileQubes provides self-service kiosks in convenient, public locations for you to rent or buy batteries on the go.
Founded in 2013, they have hundreds of kiosk locations in the U.S. and are growing rapidly. Their newest kiosk product, MQ Blue, has a smaller footprint, allowing them to enter new market verticals.
project brief
Focused on growing their user base, MobileQubes knew they needed to create a personalized digital experience with MQ Blue.
The legacy kiosks require credit card swiping, and do not allow users an easy and centralized way to track their battery rentals. MobileQubes wanted to go beyond a transactional relationship with its customers.
They approached LookFar Labs to design and develop a native mobile app for both iOS and Android users, to serve as a companion product to their MQ Blue kiosks.
MobileQubes had a backend developer in-house and were looking for a skilled frontend developer, who could cleanly marry the frontend UI to the backend functionality.
We are flexible in how we work with our partners, often collaborating with internal team members. MobileQubes was looking for guidance on UI/UX as well, and we were able to plug in to multiple project goals.
services provided
solution
We kicked things off with consulting hours to align our frontend developer with their backend developer.
While our Strategize Phase occurs in different ways based on project needs, it is always essential for our team to understand what is currently in place to determine the best path forward to achieve the company’s goals.
MobileQubes’ backend application acts as a central communication hub for all of their active kiosks.
We built a native mobile frontend to send and receive calls from their backend application. Data about the number of available batteries and the number of available return slots in each active MQ Blue kiosk is relayed thousands of times a day.
Key functionalities of the mobile app are kiosk mapping, account management, and payment processing.
We leaned heavily on system resources from each device type to access more accurate location data and to utilize the phone’s camera for scanning QR codes on MQ Blue kiosks.
The advanced mapping functionality helps users easily find the closest MQ Blue kiosk, and the QR codes enable the kiosk to know when a user is physically in front of it before ejecting a battery. We achieved all of this through a ReactNative frontend, which includes a Stripe integration to enable mobile payments.
