Lots of data on a small screen – quickly
Readpeak DSP is a platform for optimising programmatic native ad campaigns. The purchasing system is used by thousands of marketers across the Nordic countries, which means the platform needs to be fast, motivating, intuitive to use and able to display a lot of data – even on a mobile device. Rakettitiede was called to take part in the pixel-perfect development.
How many clumsy and slow interfaces are you currently using? Exactly. Readpeak wanted to make its platform inspiring as well as better than before. The goal was to create a dashboard that the marketer would genuinely want to open to see how their advertising is going.
It was the end of 2021, but the design focus was on 2025. Readpeak wanted to get everything right in one fell swoop to make future editing easy.
“The goal was to create a dashboard that the marketer would genuinely want to open to see how their advertising is going,” says Tomas Forsbäck, CEO of Readpeak. “How the platform feels and looks is an important part of the platform and our brand as a whole. The customer’s experience of the tool equals their experience of us.”
“We had for years collected feedback from hundreds, if not thousands, of customers and had a clear idea about what we should do. Our vision of an agile platform meant that we were in for a lot of work,” says Tomas Forsbäck, CEO of Readpeak.
Almost as an aside, Tomas mentions that the project was the first truly successful outsourcing in the company’s history. Outsourcing always comes with the risk that the project will take as much as it gives and that the quality of coding will not be high enough either.
A good user experience is an experience of the brand and the company as a whole
The completed DSP, which has now been used by customers for one year, constantly receives good feedback: everything works, hassle-free. Tomas Forsbäck is happy.
“When it comes to appearance and user experience, I believe in pixel-perfection. How the platform feels and looks is an important part of the platform and our brand as a whole. The customer’s experience of the tool equals their experience of us,” Forsbäck says.
According to Forsbäck, the positive effects of a successful platform are difficult to measure accurately in euros.
“When a platform is user-friendly, it affects a lot of things: the number of repurchases, future marketing efforts, and how likely the customer is to recommend us to others,” Forsbäck explains.
Arttu Ylärakkola, coder and co-founder of Rakettitiede, also says that the project was remarkably well designed and thought out. Rakettitiede was hired for their a developer’s brains and high-quality code. Readpeak’s own UI and UX design was adopted as a joint project to be completed. The actual work took a couple of weeks, and the entire project was wrapped up in a few months.
“In a project like DSP, the catch is the enormous amount of data. Yet, all the user functions still need to be quick. I sat down with a cup of coffee and just stared at two displays full of code and wondered how that code could be used to do things just as correctly, but even faster. It’s not often you get to focus on fine-tuning performance like in this project,” Ylärakkola explains.
Tomas Forsbäck says that there are several ways to produce high-quality code.
“The code may produce the same outward appearance, but the quality of the code is determined by what lies beneath the surface: how flexible is it, how fast do things work, and is it readable to others? Arttu understood that creating a good user experience is hard work,” Forsbäck says.
Competition for speed
The work of a marketer and the use of big data are reliant on how fast everything works. Forsbäck, the rest of the Readpeak team and Ylärakkola had a little tug-of-war over speed. Ylärakkola got to measure milliseconds.
“Arttu threw down the gauntlet saying it couldn’t be that hard to make the platform fast. I told him to just wait and see. As it turned out, the first version was far too slow. Still, we kept working on the dashboard improving it step by step. Which is not to say the work was easy. If you want to display a lot of data on a mobile device, you have to think a lot about what actually counts,” Forsbäck says.
He says he grew to like the way Rakettitiede worked. Forsbäck remarks that Ylärakkola dared to question things, knew how to introduce new opportunities and achieved results at an incredibly fast rate.
A time to shine for the founder
Tomas Forsbäck could tell Arttu Ylärakkola was excited about the assignment. Ylärakkola admits that he saw the project as his time to shine.
The development work was exacting, but luckily even the more challenging tasks can be carried out without gritting one’s teeth. Rocket scientist Arttu Ylärakkola sums up the assignment: “This was a great example of how tackling challenges can be nice when the group is nice.”
The work was inspiring, but he was still hesitant to take it on: as the founder of the company, he had already steered away from consulting eight years prior. Had he turned down the project, that too would have provided a moment of self-reflection for Ylärakkola.
Ylärakkola is undeniably a seasoned coder – so it’s no wonder the project was a success. What added value can a skilled coder bring to the client?
“An experienced expert knows how to speak to the client. The CEO’s focus may not always lie in technical thingamajigs, while the CTO may have a keen interested in them. An expert does not need to demonstrate their superiority; instead, their communication is realistic and transparent. If you lack self-confidence, you’ll end up sweating like a pig,” Ylärakkola says.
“Even the more challenging tasks can be carried out without gritting one’s teeth. This project was a great example of how tackling challenges can be really nice work when the group is nice.”