Deal Locator
Geo deal location
The online coupon industry exploded in 2010 with hundreds of collective buying companies launching almost overnight. We were an early thought leader in this market and built the first Canadian group buying company called, TeamBuy. We were approached to solve the emerging problem of over-saturation as users were now faced with the task of checking several sites a day to find a deal that they liked. Coupon aggregation sites were already cropping up and we were interested in building something more powerful by utilizing new technologies. It became obvious that by using the emerging geo-location technology we could build an aggregator that provided valuable context and ease of use to an otherwise difficult process.
www.deallocator.com
UX and Design
The design challenge here was to create a system that allowed users to quickly navigate to deals that they're interested in while providing key information and social options for each deal. Additionally, we needed to build a social component that allowed for commenting and sharing of these deals with friends. We allowed the map itself to become the main interface and preserved some best practices for navigation and use to make the experience intuitive.
www.deallocator.com
Mobile
Mobile was a natural second step for DealLocator. We could use the geo-location data paired with a user's current position to provide more relevant results. We built DealLocator as a native app for the iPhone that maintained the functionally and experience found on the site. A core part of the app was speed and we worked hard to make the app run quickly while aggregating hundreds of deals in real-time.
www.deallocator.com
Content Creation
The most important part of DealLocator is its content. The site needed tens of thousands of deals before it was a viable product. In order to get this content, we started working with early affiliates to structure their data, built an API for more independent teams and structured hundreds of affiliates each hand-coded into the database. From there the challenge was building scripts that could continually update the data and would ensure that the content is always up to date and accurate.
www.deallocator.com
Development
DealLocator was full of technical challenges and required extensive research, planning and testing. The first challenge was working with Google's map API to build a fully custom layout. Additionally, we had to build the map so that it could load and display over fifty thousand deals without hurting performance. We spent a great deal of time working on database architecture to improve speed, SEO and to prepare for future development. Lastly, we built a custom CMS to allow for upload, control and featuring of deals and content throughout the site.
www.deallocator.com
