TOKYO TORCH App for Tokiwabashi Tower

App which evolves with the people working in the building

TOKYO TORCH App for Tokiwabashi Tower is designed to deliver a range of convenient functions for those who work in the building such as cafeteria booking/order/payment, meeting room bookings, coffee delivery to providing the local weather forecast.
Mitsubishi Estate was looking to develop a platform that can scale and evolve with the change in how people work to always deliver the optimum user experience in a timely manner across their buildings and services. Fenrir worked as a partner to develop an app platform for office workers which is a relatively new concept in Japan.
With a vision to roll out the app across other Mitsubishi Estate buildings, the mission was to develop one with design of high availability which evolves the concept of office work with the users.

Mini Program - making updating possible

In order to accommodate the client's desire to scale this platform beyond the Tokiwabashi Tower, the team developed a foundation that allows new contents to be delivered as mini programs.
The cloud AWS and the SPA+container service adopted for the delivery platform infrastructure allowed for scalability and avalability, offering stable operation on a long-term and for services to scale in the future.
This delivery platform not only accommodates contents(mini program) to be offered according to user needs but acts as the ICT service platform for the client to offer stable system operaiton on a long-term as well as allowing for service updates for the end users.
It also offers scalability beyond a common app including contents control(add/update/delete the mini programs) as well as management of new apps, right from the admin screen.

Design and layout that caters to users across generations

Ages of people who work in an office building can vary widely so the key was to keep the layout and information display simple and be selective in the contents and information to make it easier for users to process what they see.
Given the user diversity and how the platform is to be scaled across other Mitsubishi Estate buildings, we kept the design universal to cater to all users, not skewing to a particular user preference nor to a particular buiding.

What the engineers said…

How to offer a seamless experience in the native app and the website.

Unlike the usual development project, we had to develop the app and the website simultaneously which posed a unique design challenge as we had to consider the respective scope for implementation as well as scalability. As the app will be used on multiple platforms, we made sure the UX to be seamless regardless.
For behind the scenes, we designed for long-term operation with API that allows upgrades and maintenance by function and a mechanism that allows addition/deletion of new functions according to the value returned from the API.

What the desiners said…

Making tools for the daily task engaging

As this was an app used in their daily work, we made sure that that it can seamlessly serve the users to display the information they want without the decorations and animations that doesn't add to the UX. Instead, we used colors effectively to make the tool engaging and appealing.
We see this as an app that evolves with TOKYO TORCH to become the must-have tool for the users.