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 ⚒️
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 up 🗓
Keep in mind that features in this section can change based on our planning.
Just launched 🚀
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.
The Store hub is the next step in providing a seamless brand experience between the app and your physical stores. When customers enter your store and open the app, the Store hub will launch immediately. From this view they will be able to launch store specific features and see important information like their loyalty card, vouchers or recent orders.
We currently integrate with Adyen using a Hosted Payment Page (HPP). The HPP integration we currently use needs improvement to make it future proof for the upcoming years. This cycle we are going to investigate multiple integration possibilities with Adyen. The goal of this research is to decide on the best integration solution which we are going to build in the near future.
All products that a customer requests in the app need to be fetched from your backend systems, through our Middleware. We want to reduce the time it takes to fetch these requests. We are building a solution where we will need to cache this data on our side so we can reduce loading times in the apps.
Our next improvement for the Store finder will include a toggle where customers are able to see a map view of all the stores from your brand. The map view allows customers to get a visual overview of the nearby stores based on their location. From the map view, customers can quickly navigate to the detail view of a store and find more information.
Home merchandise can already be linked to a wide variety of app content. We are expanding this with a new link type: App views. This will allow you to link home merchandise to existing app views like “Account” or “Store finder”.
We recently released the native store finder for both iOS and Android. Next to displaying the store finder in the bottom bar, we will now make it possible to place it on the account view. An additional improvement for iOS is to make the native store finder available on iPad as well.
In Studio, a lot of the interactions needed to set up content is happening inside popovers. We want to invest some time in improving the code and design of these popovers. This way they will perform better and it will be easier to interact with them.
This feature allows you to give away a free product to your customers when they have reached a certain set of rules. An example could be: “Get a free hat when spending €50”. With this feature you can let them choose and configure a product from a range of different products.
We are improving the way error messages are being displayed for input fields. We will now show input specific error messages so that users can more easily understand what information they need to correct. Next to that we are also building the foundations for complete server side validations. This will allow us to validate addresses more thoroughly. In addition, you could also choose to run these validations using your own preferred service and return custom error messages to the user.
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.
