Overview

Founded in 1937, the ACBL is the largest bridge organization in North America, serving over 165,000 members. Every year, ACBL sanction over 3.5 million tables of bridge, played in more than 3,000 bridge clubs and 1,100 sectional and regional tournaments, plus 1 million tables played online. A challenging and rewarding card game, bridge draws players of all ages and walks of life – from Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to astronaut Greg “Box” Johnson.

Client Requirements

The client came to us with the idea of making a popular game named bridge online available to bridge players around the globe. He wanted to implement the feature of online games. He also wanted to make the application available in all the states of the USA. One feature that he really insisted on was that the application should be really optimized for mobile devices even for low-end devices. As most of the players prefer to play games on their mobile devices. Another requirement was that the design of the application should resemble the color scheme of bridge games.

Discovery As with many of our projects, we kicked this project off with an in-depth interview with the key stakeholders. During our interview with them, we identified what their core values were, who their target audience was, defined some SMART goals, and kicked around ideas for how to make the application super easy to use. Through our discovery process, we were able to hone in on the priorities of the business, as well as which aesthetics we wanted to use for the new brand.

Strategy Domain and Application understanding during our discovery process drove us into the very important decisions that were made during UI Designs, Technology selections, and Architecture. The client does not have any Technology preference but some base guidelines for their future application, including some points like it should be fast and easy to maintain. PHP alongside its framework Codeigniter and MySQL as a DB was suggested in the presentation by our CTO with the client management team. They happily agreed to them.

Build

During the design phase, we applied the design styles from the mood boards to the wireframes. The typography, colors, and imagery were all hand-selected to convey friendliness and trust to those using the platform.

The Learn To Play Bridge application was built on a custom Codeigniter framework for ultimate scalability for future growth. We did not use any pre-built modules for the site, giving us free rein on the design and functionality of each feature, which allowed us to build the website exactly how ACBL owners envisioned it without restrictions.

Test & Launch

Testing this web application was an intense process!

After thoroughly testing the site on multiple devices and browsers, we were confident things were working as they should, scheduled launch date, and launched the web app live for the economic community to enjoy.