Every few weeks you can look forward to new features on the Highstreet platform. Here you will find an overview of the latest features, what’s next and what we are currently working on.
IN PROGRESS ⚒️
We are going to work on the ability of our platform to synchronize the customer favorites with the commerce backend. This allows customers to save products in the app and also see these same products in their favorites section on the website (or the other way around). Right now we will focus on an implementation with Salesforce.
We recently let a specialised company perform a security audit on our apps and backend. We prioritised and filtered issues from the audit based on their threat level and whether the issue is actionable. We are going to fix the most important issues so that our platform becomes less prone to potential attacks.
We are really impressed with all the great video lookbooks we currently see on the platform and want to make the experience even better. With this project we make some refinements to video lookbooks that will make it easier to create them in Studio and make the experience better for your customers.
Next up 🗓
Keep in mind that features in this section can change based on our planning.
We are exploring how we can automate the process of replacing splash screens and account images in the apps. The first step we will take is building an interface in Studio where these images can be uploaded. We are also looking in to automating the entire process, where no app update is needed for these images to be changed. This will be considered for a future project.
We recently worked on the foundations for a complete navigation redesign on Android (similar to what we did on iOS). With this project we are finishing the redesign of the navigation and improve the way Android users can navigate your categories in the apps.
We are improving the way product requests are being handled in our Magento 2 checkout implementation. This way we can speed up the rather slow requests from Magento and make the experience in our apps better.
We recently implemented measurements to our apps and backend to see where we could improve in terms of speed. We analysed this data and are now going to implement some changes that would help to make the apps and backend on our platform faster.
We are constantly doing work on improving the backend of the platform. In the upcoming weeks we are going to further update our products model on Android. This means we are refactoring the way product data is handled. By reworking the product API’s our apps will become faster and more flexible.
Just launched 🚀
Video has the ability to convey an incredible amount of information very fast. Just like with video lookbooks, we believe video content is becoming more important in e-commerce apps. Video gives your customers more information about how the product looks and brands are discovering that it can help to reduce the return rate of your orders as well. Product videos will be available on iOS first.
Last year, we completely redesigned the navigation bar on iOS. Moving this element from the top of your category views to the bottom helps reachability and ease of use. This year we are going to bring this navigation pattern to Android as well. Because Android now has a completely different navigation pattern, we first need to do some foundational work before we can ship this feature. This cycle we take care of the foundational work so we can release the complete feature soon.
Apple is soon going to require apps to ask users for permission before tracking them. This is done using a system prompt. Until the user has given permission, apps do not have access to the Advertising Identifier (IDFA). While we do not use the IDFA or perform tracking ourselves, we do include 3rd party SDKs that do so. By default this popover will be disabled, but it can be activated on request.
We are constantly doing work on improving the backend of the platform. In the upcoming weeks we are going to update our products model on Android. This means we are refactoring the way product data is handled. By reworking the product API’s our apps will become faster and more flexible.
We currently require specific size restrictions for most of the images you upload in Studio. With this improvement we want to give you more flexibility when it comes to uploading images. Size requirements will become less strict and Studio will help you to crop your images to the correct size.
With this improvement you will be to track the effectiveness of your Apple Search Ads. You will be able to see who installed the app because of such an ad and what users do after they download your app because of an Apple Search Ad. This information will be integrated in our current analytics setup.
We currently integrate with Adyen using a Hosted Payment Page (HPP). The HPP integration we currently use needs to be updated to make it future proof. We recently did research on what would be the best approach and in this project we are going to update our Adyen integration.
The goal of this project is to migrate all remaining data caches to our new distributed caching system. This way we prevent having a single-point-of-failure for our cache and we have a more stable and scaleable environment for during peak traffic times
We are going to improve the way we do quality assurance within our Studio team. In this project we are going to create an automated test environment and improve the testing capabilities of push notifications. This way we can do better testing when we release a new feature or fix bugs.
Next to building new features, improving our existing ones also has our priority. We will spend some time on improving the performance of important parts of the apps like the category views and the product detail view. To do this we will first need to gather data in the front and backend of the apps to pinpoint where improvements can be made. After this is done we can plan specific tasks to increase the speed of these views.
We care a lot about realistic previews of the content you create in Studio. The device previews in Studio give an accurate way of previewing content, but the best test is to see your content on an actual device. We are going to work on a preview functionality for home walls just like you can already do for lookbooks. Just scan a QR code and preview your home wall on your device.
Lookbooks are a big pillar of our apps and a feature that is heavily used by all brands. To bring lookbooks to the next level we are introducing video lookbooks! This new type of lookbook will let you link products to your video content and present it in a way where customers are able to shop the products visible in your video’s.
Do you want to learn more about Highstreet and how to create beautifully designed app experiences that will help you grow your business? Leave us a note and we will come back to you.
