Building mobile apps for Bharat

Rahul Kulkarni

Rahul Kulkarni

12th May 2024

Building mobile apps for Bharat

At SaffronStays, we believe holidays are about togetherness and bonding, in your own private space, away from maddening crowds — “Family, matlab SaffronStays!” being our tagline. 

To elevate your staycation experience, we set out on a mission to empower our on-ground teams, enabling them to know your preferences, complete mandates and collect payments seamlessly in record times. 

This led us to build the Caretaker app — a true marvel of engineering and design, which addressed the everyday challenges faced by our on-ground teams and caretakers, who indeed represent users of Bharat in general.

Who are our Caretakers? 

A caretaker, responsible for managing your stay, can be from the nearby village to even the homeowner. When we set out building this app, we had to aim to satisfy this wide userbase.

We started by researching the challenges our users face daily while managing guest experience. This involved in-depth conversations with our operations team and caretakers to grasp their perspective. It directed our focus to three main issues: user flow, language barriers, and mobile network limitations.

Design & User flow

While conversing with our users, we realized too much information caused confusion, much of which was shown was irrelevant to them. Therefore, we focused on crafting the most minimalist user experience achievable, presenting only the absolutely necessary information at any given moment. 

To guarantee that only pertinent information is displayed to our users, we developed two separate flows: pre-checkout and post-checkout. Typically, the pre-checkout flow concentrates on conveying guest preferences, fulfilling mandates, and collecting payments super seamlessly. While the post-checkout flow centers on gathering feedback and providing users with documentation for future reference.

Language Barriers

Our villas are situated in remote locations, deeply immersed in nature. And so to provide employment in this remote places and ensure convenience convenience to our guests, the caretakers for these villas are typically from nearby villages, often with limited educational backgrounds.

Given the user persona, translating our apps into local languages has always been a priority. 

Initially, we opted for the Google Translate API, only to discover its limitations for our specific use case. This decision inadvertently increased complexity, which was the opposite of our intended goal. As an illustration, let’s examine the translation of the names of one of our villas.

Our journey led us to develop an in-house translation framework powered by AI, enabling us to launch our app in Hindi, Marathi, and English. Additionally, we have streamlined the process of translating into other local languages for our apps and future products.

Mobile network limitations

A booking with us may entail a a caretaker to complete around ~10 tasks, from marking checkins to collecting additional payments, requiring to open the app approximately 5–7 times and uploading over 20–30 images and documents. This process can poses a challenge, particularly if the villa is situated in a remote area with limited mobile network and wifi connectivity.

In addition to enhancing features for streamlining the checkin / checkout processes on the app, we developed a pioneering caching structure, a first in the industry. This innovation enables our apps to operate efficiently with less than ~1mbps of data (less than 3G network speeds), resulting in a remarkable 70% increase in upload speeds, and nearly an offline capable app — close to functioning even without an internet connection.

Special mention to Tanmaya and Utsav, who built and designed the app.