Three key elements enabled the team to deliver the service at pace.
Close Collaboration across the Team
Kin + Carta Create Engineers collaborated closely with M&S Product and UX teams to
provide continuous feedback and tight iteration loops to ensure a
quality experience for customers. An example of this can be seen in the
payment experience. When testing an early prototype, the team found
it was almost too easy to pay, and users were tapping and paying
before they had completed their shop. As a result, the team switched
to a swipe across interaction to prevent mistaken payments.
Native Front-End Best Practice
The requirement to deliver the service through the core Marks &
Spencer app required some creative thinking to minimise the impact
on the existing iOS development team while ensuring a smooth
integration. The team identified that by building the front-end service
as a separate framework on iOS, they could develop and test it
independently before it was integrated and deployed to the main M&S
app for the trial.
Adopting M&S Technical Standards
The team deployed and ran everything in Azure and M&S’s Kubernetes
cluster, including an API built by Kin + Carta Create to handle payments and
completion of transactions in M&S systems. Following M&S's latest
technical standards and closely collaborating with M&S engineers and
product managers ensured quality and ease of handover to the team
who are now supporting the service.