Acclaimed UX design and Implementation

Virta has over 170.000 charging points in its roaming network. We designed a streamlined, user-friendly solution for their users to access charging stations, complete with location-based services and ratings for the stations.

Virta Home charging service was awarded as the best EV charging solution at eMove360°, the world’s largest trade fair for electric mobility and autonomous driving.

“Working with Oivan has been easy and produced excellent results for us. The business we are in is changing rapidly and we needed a company that was able to work with us in an agile way in constantly changing environment. We also wanted to make sure that user experience in our mobile apps is world class and that location based services work fluently. Oivan has proven to be a good partner for us and have helped us a lot in our business”

Jussi Ahtikari, CTO

The Client

Virta is Europe’s fastest-growing electric vehicle charging platfor. It provides an e-car charging station service for its registered members. Users can use the Virta card and mobile app to find and reserve charging stations, and to charge and pay with a few steps at Virta stations throughout Finland. Virta service can now also be used for international eRoaming in select European markets.

The Solution

In the spring of 2015, Virta was looking for a new software development partner to take over the development of their native mobile apps from the previous developer company. At Oivan we felt that we could be a very good development partner for Virta, considering our strong experience in building location-based services, including the award-winning Spot Digger mobile app and Tiloja.fi commercial real estate service.

For larger development steps, such as the complete redesign of Virta’s iOS app, we have created specific project plans that have allowed Virta to have clear visibility on the development milestones. The new streamlined Virta iOS app was released in Apple’s App Store 2nd of September 2016 and has since been updated to e.g. include support for international eRoaming.

In the Virta iOS app redesign project we worked hard on simplifying the user experience while adding some new key features, such as the possibility to rate charging stations. During the project we completely changed the code-base of Virta iOS app from Xamarin hybrid technology to Apple’s new programming language Swift. Additionally, one of the key focus areas in development was the optimization of the map view that provides the core of the app’s user experience.