I began working on a mobile application in April 2015, after the Town Administrator and Board of Trustees decided that an app would be a valuable marketing tool for Bennett. With the assistance of another team member, I began evaluating possible mobile developers over a period of several weeks. A number of possible candidates emerged, but most were more familiar with creating apps focused on tourism and did not offer the robust functionality we were looking for.

The decision was eventually made to use the PublicStuff platform due to their expertise in developing products for government applications. With a developer onboard my duties evolved to designing the visual aspects of the app, such as choosing imagery, defining color palettes and designing an emblematic icon for the app.

Once the visuals were decided I began work on building out the content database of the app, which included:

• ● Defining content sections
• ● Importing employee bios and contact info
• ● Creating service maps and directories
• ● Determining service request topics
• ● Designing workflows for each service request

Eventhough Access Bennett was a relatively simple app, other projects routinely took priority over it. Development was slow over the next few months and eventually stalled until summer of 2016. At this point, it was decided that the launch of the app should co-incide with Bennett Days, an annual community harvest festival. With only two months until Bennett Days, work shifted to completing the online request functionality of the app. For every request type created a workflow had to be designed which determined what department and which staff member the request would be assigned to. This was a slow and tedious process, but was a key requirement in launching a useful app.

Access Bennet was completed and submitted to the various app stores with only one week to spare, and was launched successfully at the Bennett Days festival in September 2016.

• ● TOWN OF BENNETT WEBSITE