Omtech | C-Visitenkarte

The Vision

C-Visitenkarte Application

The Corona outbreak is one of the toughest challenges humanity had to face, ever. People were ordered to stay inside their homes, social gatherings weren’t allowed, and unprecedented travel restrictions were put in place. Anything that would control the spread of the virus was adopted. But, these hard times also led people to conceive the most creative and transformational ideas with the power to change the world.

Our partner came in with a brilliantly simple approach to help build a safe environment within the fear-soaked world in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. It was an app that could track and identify individuals who had come from the infected zones.

The goal was to develop a IT Solution that can collect and track extensive visitor records and ease the entry/exit of people visiting a particular store. The visit and tracking would be as contact-free as possible. The solution would contribute towards stopping the uncontrolled spread of the virus and saving lives.

With our deep understanding of both healthcare and technology, we have developed a world-class IT Solution that solves the above challenges. Discover how!

Our Solution

Tap To Scan, Scan To Go

The C-Visitenkarte App makes it easy to digitize check-in and check-out at local shops like restaurants, retailers, hairdressers, and so on. A straightforward 1-time registration combined with scanning a QR code makes the process convenient for the business and its customers. Both benefit from a contactless and lightning-fast exchange of contact data, which is fully secure and encrypted. The data can be useful to the health department to trace chains of infection at any time.

The C-Visitenkarte App concentrates on being time-sensitive, which adds to its usability in places experiencing high footfalls. In fact, if the customers forget to check out from the store via QR code, the app will remind them after 6 hours to check out.

The admin can easily manage customers’ data, exported into a PDF or DOC format for processing.

Main Features

QR-code check-in and check-out

A store owner can set up a digital store to create QR codes that point to the store. Using the PDF export function, they can download or share the QR code to print it. Other users can scan these QR codes with the camera app or the C-Visitenkarte App to check in or check out.

If a customer forgets to check out, they will be notified and can search the history of visits to manually check out that particular visit. The app makes sure that the user is not scanning accidentally two times a “check-in” process and notifies them accordingly.

Both sites have individual views to see their visits or as an owner to see the visits of other users of a specific store. All visits can be easily exported as an excel file and shared with the health department.

The QR code functionality is easy to use and takes less than 2 clicks to complete.

Discover Space

The C-Visitenkarte App allows a customer to view all store visits at a glance. Each visit is a single entry and consists out of a check-in and check-out event. Only if both events are completed is the entire event considered complete. If the check-out is missed, the user gets informed in time.

When check-in or out, the user can see all relevant store details by using the QR-code scanning.

Store management

A store owner can create a store by filling out a creation screen and adding mandatory information. A store can also be saved as a draft. After completion and publishment, the store can be easily managed, tracked, customized, and deleted again.

It is easy for the store owner to see which store was visited by whom and when by simply opening the store and checking the check-ins.

The store owner can also customize attributes. With an intuitive user interface, even 25+ stores can be easily managed by one owner.

In-App purchase

Store owners can buy a monthly subscription to extend the store creation limit of 5. Subscription offers 2 different plans. Plans differentiate from each other based on the variety of functionality it provides and how many stores can be published.

The payment is managed by the app stores and can be tracked in the app and admin panel. Store owners can cancel the license subscription at any time before the next monthly booking.

The IAP function is designed to work cross-platform.

Push- and In-app-notifications

Includes a comprehensive notification/reminder system that keeps customers and store owners informed.

If the customer forgets to check out, the app reminds them to do it manually after 6 hours.

The app will notify you periodically when it is needed. All push notifications can be configured and turned off if required.

Feature Overview

User registration and profile management

Customer check-in and check-out validations

New store creation and authentication

Activation and deactivate store

Customer information management

Notification alerts

Admin dashboard and management

QR code history management

Tech Stack

We are listening to our customers and thrive to cover all open questions and demystify software development processes and technologies behind it. Enjoy exploring some of the topics in our blog categories below.

Native Development android (kotlin), iOS (swift)

Native App Development is the creation of software programs that run on specific devices and platforms. You can build beautiful native apps for target devices-smartphones.

Back-End Framework, Logic, Server

We used the laravel framework for the back-end. The laravel framework provides a structure and incorporates security measures to prevent hackers from injecting harmful code into the server. For our database, we used MySQL, which is widely accepted and offers atomic, consistent, and go-to solutions for data integrity. From the server-to-client interface, APIs were written to perform back-end logic and called to generate QR codes based on user information retrieved from a database.

Social logins

The api returns the relevant authority to allow the user to access app functionality easily. The purpose of integrating social logins in C-Visitenkarte is a frictionless process of accessing sites and apps that don’t require excess credentials and allows users to skip past cumbersome registration procedures.

Firebase notifications

The firebase cloud messaging SDKs for android and iOS. We integrated these APIs that allow a cross-platform messaging solution and let you assuredly receive responses and notifications at no cost. It makes the application user responsive.

In-app purchase

We have integrated the in-app purchase functionalities in the C-Visitenkarte App to provide different subscription plans to store owners. Google play console offers a lot of flexibility when creating subscription-based products. An entrepreneur repeatedly needs to subscribe to a plan for C-Visitenkarte.

Data encryption and decryption

We have used encryption and decryption data security methods to transfer personal data securely in the C-Visitenkarte App. It makes the secure authentication between the server and the user. Encryption is the plain text data incomprehensible, also called ciphertext. Decryption is converting the ciphertext back to plaintext.

PDF creation

The portable document format (PDF) allows users to maintain visually pleasing layouts and compress the high-quality files into relatively small file sizes, and it is a widely accepted format. We have implemented the PDF creation feature in the C-Visitenkarte App to maintain the client’s information, create and manage invoices, export, and other documentation processes.

Admin panel

We have created the custom admin panel for the C-Visitenkarte App. The admin can track the number of users who have registered with the C-Visitenkarte App. Administrators can manage user queries, number of visitors, new users, and keep track of all outstanding payments with total subscribers. Moreover, the admin can manage invoices, export, and import other documentation.

Challenge

Biggest Challenge And Our Journey Of Overcoming

In-app purchase recurring payment was difficult for us to implement on cross-platform. The reason was that membership purchased through iOS is not readily available to android, as apple does not provide an api for it. Android provides an api that provides information about the current state of the membership and can be queried through the server.

By reading extensive literature and browsing best practices on stack overflow, we developed, tested, and optimized a solution for our use case together with the development community. By using regular jobs of the server, memberships can now be queried across platforms, and it is ensured that the current status of the membership is accessible regardless of the platform.

Like “storms hit your weakness, but unlock your true strength”, challenges were good to improve us and our potential and provide C-Visitenkarte/our client the best result possible.

Special Moment

Most Special Moment In Our Journey

For us, the most exciting step was testing the application. Creating digital businesses, simulating customers, and a real store to ensure the primary function of the app was very interesting.

Creating QR codes, check-in, and check-out, notifications, visualizing the entries in real-time, using a clean UI that, regardless of whether the owner has 1, 2, 3, or more stores, displays the contact information and QR code of each visitor for each store with just a few taps.

Additionally, it was inspired to consider time zone management in the process—customer device time vs. Server time vs. Store owner device time.
Implementing all functions, the extended testing, and the simulation of the processes was very instructive and valuable for us and all further projects.

Keeping users safe and corona-free with a high-quality, satisfying technical solution is our mission as the client’s 360° software development partner. We're curious about your thoughts!