Crossing the Empty Quarter

‘Crossing the Empty Quarter’

App Brief and Specification Document

Aims & Objectives

To produce an engaging and beautiful app to promote and inform users of the ‘Crossing the Empty Quarter’ expedition.

This expedition recreates Bertram Thomas’ historic crossing of the Empty Quarter in 1930, the website should provide historical references to this journey, however the focus should not only be on Thomas but also on the Arabs who journeyed with him.

All app content should be available in both English and Arabic.

How should a user switch between languages, is there a way to do this automatically based on phone language?

The app should provide information on the expedition via a journey map, blog posts, photos, tweets from the field and other sources

In order to ensure engagement throughout the journey, the app will feature a competition, with prizes of free places on a Connecting Cultures expedition for the winners.

Any server side hosting required for the app should be provided by the app developer and included in any proposals.

The name of the app is yet to be decided. (Max around 12 characters including spacing)

Delivery Milestones

End May: Designs finalised. There may need to be several iterations of the designs before the client signs off designs so this should be taken into consideration
June – early July: App build
July - early August: App testing and sign off
14th August: App go live at the latest
September: Expedition press launch

The app designs should have the same look and feel as the website and print designs, the website design will be completed by early May.

Proposals should include pricing for app designs, though it may be that the client decides to use the website designer for the app designs as well.

Technology

The app will be built to run on both iOS and Android platforms. The app should run both on phones and tablets, the layout of the app should be responsive to the size of the device is being used on.

The app will use a data feed from the Crossing the Empty Quarter website to load blog posts, however other information such as the about & team information will be stored statically within the app. The data feed will be available in JSON format, the exact format of this will be agreed with the development team prior to development beginning and a mock JSON file will be provided to the development team in order to aim development and testing of the app.

The app will push notifications to the user’s device when new blog entries have been posted. Opening the push notification will take the user to ‘detail’ screen for that blog entry.

Will 2 separate apps be built or will we use something like PhoneGap to build once, deploy to both platforms. Costs for both approaches should be included in proposals.

Analytics

It is of upmost importance in order to help measure the reach, usage and impact of the expedition that app analytics are captured. Analytics data should be made available for the expedition PR team throughout and after the expedition

General Styling

A designer will be used to create designs for both the expedition website and the app, the look and feel across the app and website should be consistent.

The Scott Expedition site ( has been given as an example of the kind of look & feel preferred for the new site. Examples of colour schemes that the client likes are British Exploring ( and Outward Bound Trust grey background (

The BBC news app has been suggested as an app which is laid out in a very user friendly way, elements of which could be emulated in the expedition app. (

Menu Structure

We would like to use a horizontal scrolling menu as per the BBC News app (and other apps)

The menu should feature the following categories.

Map
Latest
About
Science
Team
Competition

Latest

Lists the latest blog entries and tweets from the expedition in reverse chronological order. The most recent item should be larger than following items in the list. Scrolling down the list should automatically load more entries. All entries should display the relative time since posting (i.e. ’30 minutes ago’). For blog entries the photo and title of the entry should be displayed in the list. Tweets should be styled differently to differentiate them from blog entries.

It should be possible to click a blog entry in order to view the ‘detail’ screen for that entry. The blog entry ‘detail’ screen should show all photos for that entry, the title, a small static map to show the location of the blog entry and the full text content of the entry along with any other Meta data (temperature, date etc.). Clicking on the small static map should take the user to the journey map screen.

On the detail screen the main blog post image should be displayed at the top, clicking the image will display it full screen. If there is more than one image for a blog post the user should be able to swipe left/right to view the other images (image carousel style).

It would also be desirable to allow users to post comments on blog entries via the app, however as the website back-end is built using WordPress the website team must do some further research on ways to securely post comments to a WordPress site from an app.

Map

The map should show the teams’ progress across the Empty Quarter via map pins (which denote blog entries) and a line which shows the route between each of these pins.

The map should allow the user to switch between the three different types of blog entries (current journey, Thomas’ journey and Archaeology). Each different type of map pin should feature a different icon.

Clicking on the icons should show the blog entry associated with that map pin

More information on the content of the map screen can be found in the document ‘Crossing the Empty Quarter Website Spec.docx’ – ‘Map’ section.

A key deliverable here is to ensure the map does not feel cluttered with icons and information due to the reduced space as compared to the website

About

This will feature the same information as the corresponding page on the website. (See ‘Crossing the Empty Quarter Website Spec.docx’). The information on this page should be help statically within the app rather than being pulled from the website data feed.

Team

Science

Competition

The competition will take the form of an Instagram photo competition. Each week there will be a thought or theme, entrants will have to send in a photo via their Instagram account which sum up this theme. Weekly winners will be selected based on the judges’ opinions. At the end of the journey, 36 overall winners will be selected (18 boys, 18 girls) based not only on the quality of images captured and how well they match the theme, but also how many of the weekly competitions that person has entered.

The competition screen of the app should show the previous week’s winning photo and also the theme and hash tags for the current weeks’ competition theme. The user should be able to press a button which allows them to submit a photo to the competition either from their camera album or by taking a photo.

It seems there is no public Instagram API which allows the direct posting of photos from another app so some research needs to be carried out by the app developer to design the most user friendly and friction free way to allow app users to submit photos to the competition.