Percy's Treasure Hunt

Inspiration

We were inspired by a suggestion in M&S's challenge slide discussing the idea of gameification of the M&S apps barcode scanner. We ran with this idea in a slightly different way, by creating an in-app treasure hunt to encourage app users to view a wider range of products with freebie and discount incentives.

What it does

When a product is added to the customers basket in-app, there is a chance that the treasure hunt will be triggered and a notification will pop up at the top of the screen. If clicked on, the customer will have the opportunity to solve a riddle and go to the product page associated with the answer to find part of a redeemable code. When they have solved all clues, they can unscramble the code word to redeem an offer in the rewards section of the M&S app.

How we built it

We utilised c# and asp.net to create a demo web server to showcase a potential user-journey for this treasure hunt in an M&S style application (as we could not integrate with the actual M&S app). We also used flutter and dart to develop an app template for android that would showcase the same functionality but within an actual mobile application. Lastly, we created design mock-ups of what this functionality would looklike within the actual M&S iOS app to fully display the design ideas we were trying to convey as well as the functionality shown by both applications.

Challenges we ran into

As we could not actually integrate into the M&S app or website, we had to find a solution that would allow us to properly convey all aspects of the hack we wanted to do, both in design and implementation. It meant three seperate smaller projects then had to be completed rather than one large one, but ultimately we feel it was the best way to show what we were going for. We struggled initially to find suitable software to create the mobile application on as many were hard to customise or in languages we were very unfamiliar with, but flutter was a good solution to this.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We worked very well together in a team to complete all aspects of the hack and managed to be successful even when using technology we were unfamiliar with.

What we learned

We learned lots about different aspects of creating a webapp and mobile app, as well as working with more design-oriented software which was out of our comfort zones. We learned more about working well together and collaborating with one another to ensure a coherent end product.

What's next for Percy's Treasure Hunt

We would like to implement fun and similar functionality into the barcode scanner of the M&S app - potentially along the lines of if you scan a barcode in store that matches an item in your wishlist, there would be an opportunity to win discounts or add-ons as incentive to keep going in store and shopping with M&S.