FountainsApp Design, Shopping Center Back to the portfolio

Project Story

Fountains at Roseville is an upscale, open-air shopping mall in the city of Roseville, California. Located about 20 minutes outside of Sacramento, Roseville is hub of high-tech companies and a major railroad transportation hub, but its real focus is retail shopping. Roseville has the 11th highest retail sales among all California cities, even though it is the 47th in population.

When the Fountains management contacted us for an app, they were looking to leverage their active events schedule with an easy-to-use directory of their businesses. After all, the point to having events at a shopping center is to attract people who then visit the stores and restaurants to shop and eat. Fountains has nine restaurants, ranging from innovative sushi at Makuni Kaizan to adult playground Dave & Busters. Shopping ranges from a Whole Foods Market to White House|Black Market.

More importantly, Fountains needed the app on a very short timeframe. They wanted the app available for download by July 29th, giving us only 14 days for development and approval from Apple, and Apple always takes at least eight days to approve a new app. So, technically, we had six days to create, populate and approve an app. Fountains helped in that by doing the design work for the loading screen and main screen themselves, letting us focus on data collection, organization, and design. Once we had gathered all the business information and put it into the app database, we ran into a major snag. Since each business in the shopping center uses the same street address and a suite number, Google Maps, put all of the pins marking each business on top of each other, so it hid all the businesses in a building behind one listing. And several of the addresses were geo-locating into the middle of the intersection. So Heidi and I spend a semi-warm summer evening, going door to door, getting the exact geo-location (latitude and longitude coordinates) for each business. Plus, we had a nice dinner at Tres (a Mexican restaurant with a large Tequila selection) and then gelato at Miabella Gelato.

Once all the locations were set and updated, we started in on the Events. Fountains has regular concerts twice a week through September, a Family Fun Night every Friday, and a Street Fair on the first Friday of every month. We had a preliminary sign-off from the Fountains after five days of design, and submitted the app to Apple, knowing it would only be approved the day before deadline. As the app sat at Apple, we continued to update the events, and other content about Fountains amenities, services and making small corrections and changes to the information.

Right on schedule, Apple approved the Fountains at Roseville app in eight days, letting us hit our target with a day to spare. App conceived, designed, populated and approved in 14 days.

– Ross Rojek, App Develoment Team

Reference

Elizabeth Nagel
Fountains at Roseville
916.772.4107
Email: elizabeth at intercalre dot com