Client Snapshot: National less-than-truckload (LTL) transportation company headquartered in the Midwest
Project Snapshot
A team of Keyhole consultants joined the client’s team of engineers to develop a customized front-end software application that improved user experience. This was an initiative to modernize a legacy user interface and move to a web-based UI that replicated existing functionality.
Although the previous application was effective, it did not support some of the shortcut functionality users had come to expect of the terminal, such as arrow key screen navigation, hotkeys, and special paste behavior.
Technology Overview
The technical solution was to create a ReactJS single-page application that used RESTful services to repaint a grid-based display to mimic user expectations. The grid-based display allowed for arrow key navigation, cursor location awareness, and special paste behavior.
Keyhole’s consultants assisted the team in providing popups for user preferences, printing, and batch uploads. Using a grid-based display meant that they could not use some standard HTML components, such as input fields or drop-down selects. The team had to override some standard web functionality like KeyEvent, MouseEvent, and ClipBoardEvent handling in order to carry out the task.
Consulting Area of Note
A technical lead was brought in to analyze and architect a plan to modernize the existing legacy application. His analysis and Proof-Of-Concept efforts included UI and data architecture (layout, data retrieval, and screen placement), cursor and arrow navigation, cursor sensing, block copy/paste, hotspots, and preference systems. He used small POCs to achieve his main goal of providing an analysis of the level of effort and time estimates for the project.
Development was performed in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. The client was pleased with the evaluations and estimates and chose to have Keyhole proceed with the redesign.