Case Study: Don't Mess with Texas

THEIR STORY
Since 1985, the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) has taken a hard stance against littering. With a primary focus on Texas’ 3,233 miles of roads, TxDOT’s “Don’t Mess with Texas” campaign is the gold-standard and the most successful of its kind in the country.

Over the years, TxDOT has utilized robust messaging across multiple channels to engage folks in the Don’t Mess with Texas mission, including launching an interactive app. Christened the “Litterer”, this app allowed people to help police litterbugs across the state in an anonymous, non-threatening manner.

The EX Squared UX design and development teams on the Don’t mess with Texas (DMWT) project needed to update the client’s website and app, both to update the campaign’s overall image and so that app users could utilize voice activation to report littering incidents more safely and easily. Because most app users will be reporting from the road, we needed to give them a way to use voice activation when they see someone littering.

The EX Squared team also needed to link up several backend elements for Don’t mess with Texas, such as connecting the app with multiple car and license plate databases, so the reports could be as accurate as possible. This case study is a good example of how EX Squared can help redesign an app and a website from the ground up to meet user and client needs and improve overall UX capabilities for our client.

The EX Squared UX design and development teams on the Don’t mess with Texas (DMWT) project needed to update the client’s website and app, both to update the campaign’s overall image and so that app users could utilize voice activation to report littering incidents more safely and easily. Because most app users will be reporting from the road, we needed to give them a way to use voice activation when they see someone littering.

The EX Squared team also needed to link up several backend elements for Don’t mess with Texas, such as connecting the app with multiple car and license plate databases, so the reports could be as accurate as possible. This case study is a good example of how EX Squared can help redesign an app and a website from the ground up to meet user and client needs and improve overall UX capabilities for our client.

EX Squared took the basic client request and were able to redesign the campaign’s app and website to be better integrated across platforms, more modern, safer, and very user-friendly. By utilizing the server-less model offered by Google cloud, Dialogflow, and Flutter, EX Squared developers were also able to hand over a lower-cost model that could do more with less. The cloud model also lays a solid groundwork for future usage and easy, lower-cost updates that also take less time.

By rebuilding the Don’t mess with Texas app and website with these Google cloud tools, the EX Squared's development and UX design teams tapped into the power of Google development teams working behind the scenes. As Google updates the cloud and tools such as Flutter, DMWT gains a full team keeping their systems up to date as technology improves and evolves in the future, all with a low monthly fee vs. paying a separate team to continue to update everything in the backend. This saves the client, time, money, and hassle.

In addition, the EX Squared offered DMWT the massive benefit of having development and UX teams discuss their plans, needs, and expectations early on in the development cycle. Having development and UX teams collaborate and communicate so often at the beginning of the project, vs. at the end, also meant saving time, money, and hassle, because they were able to work together and streamline the process.

The client is happy with the outcome. We improved UX overall, bringing better functionality, a voice activated interface, and updated visual appeal to the app and website. In addition, by building the backend architecture on Google cloud and using Google Dialogflow and on the front end with Google Flutter, EX Squared created an easily updatable system. If the client wants to add interactive features to the voice activation tool in the future, for example, providing answers to FAQs, the system is set up to easily and relatively inexpensively add that.

The cloud model, being server-less with auto-scaling features, means DMWT can accommodate many users without an increase in server charges. This was EX Squared's first in-house experience using Flutter and Google cloud tools together in this way. These tools have proven to be easy to use and a super positive experience for our teams and client. By programming the app and website to save data to the Google databases provide with these tools, the client can spend more time on building business value and more money on added features going forward.