Pluto is a web application that makes travel insurance easy to understand, hassle-free, and more tailored to customers’ needs. In order to make a difference within the industry, the product has to distinguish itself from any other platform available – the UI needs to shine and a slick and fast UX is absolutely key to success. Code & Pepper took up the challenge to ensure Pluto delights users with its design and operates flawlessly in terms of development.
About Pluto
Pluto is a web application that makes travel insurance easy to understand, hassle-free, and more tailored to customers’ needs. In order to make a difference within the industry, the product has to distinguish itself from any other platform available. The brand and the UI really need to shine and a slick and fast UX is absolutely key to success.
Challenge
When Code & Pepper initiated their talks with Pluto, the app development had already been started by other developers. However, after initial contact it turned out that Code & Pepper was able to deliver a product that exactly met the high demands of the industry. The mission was to design a web application that takes away the hardships of finding and buying the right travel insurance policy.
Solutions for Pluto
Practical and aesthetic approach to UI/UX design
The team started off by studying the style guide and design library Pluto had created before engaging Code & Pepper. These basic elements were transformed into reusable components that could be applied across the web application. To ensure the components would function as expected, they were incorporated into the product development stage – customer journey, product flows, and mockup screens. This way, the whole structure and requirements of the product had been carefully studied and understood before the actual development process.
Focus on performance in front-end development
After designing the UI components and product flows, it was time to put them to work. A multiple-tool audit revealed a lot of room for improvement in terms of performance. The initial page load could potentially impact business operations and lower the conversion. Code & Pepper have optimised several aspects of the app, including lazy loading and GZIP compression (React, WebPack, JavaScript, Express, Heroku). The choice of React was due to its outstanding efficiency in real-time data processing.
Integration with Starling Bank
Starling is one of the leading British digital banking services in the UK, providing its users with a special feature called Marketplace. In order to discover new user bases, it was decided to incorporate Pluto in the Insurance category. This way, clients can go to Pluto from Starling, buy a travel insurance and display the policy details in their account inside the Starling Marketplace. The challenges in this part were related to the authentication process, which required several changes on the back-end and front-end of the application.
Integration with Monzo Bank
The idea behind the integration with Monzo Bank was to create a separate service with Quote API – after sending a request with trip details, the user would receive information about the insurance price. The solution was created with Koa, TypeScript, Mongoose, JEST, integration and load tests using Artillery . The pricing engine, available in another service, needed to be coded from scratch as the existing one hadn’t been up to the quality standards Code & Pepper aims for.
I really value Code & Pepper for their proactive attitude, transparency, and detailed attention to security. The development team was always very helpful and open in explaining all technical matters.
