Stimulating culture across borders with a new digital platform - Perform Europe

Perform Europe had already carefully planned the project from the very start. In order to be able to respect that set go-live deadline, we needed to closely monitor the scope and iterations of the platform. We therefore started by looking at a detailed view of what we were going to build exactly together with Perform Europe. We then split up this scope into manageable sprints of 3 weeks. This way, everybody had a good understanding of what the end product would look like, and how we’d get there.

Built on the shoulders of a giant

We built the Perform Europe platform with Firebase, a powerful part of Google’s Cloud Platform stack. Thanks to its enormous flexbility and extensive possibilities, Firebase takes care of many things at once: hosting the front-end of Perform Europe, storing documents from users, sending notifications, user management, secure login and so much more.

The choice to use Firebase was an easy one, since it offers a lot of functionality out-of-the-box, such as a real-time database, authentication, fine-grained control and remote configuration.

Additionally, Firebase’s generous use quota keeps the cost of hosting the entire Perform Europe platform extremely low.

Our approach began with a detailed analysis of Perform Europe’s requirements, followed by an agile development process using 3-week sprints. We prioritized a strong collaboration with Perform Europe to ensure the platform met their unique needs. To achieve flexibility, we chose Firebase as the backbone of the platform, leveraging its real-time database, user management, and cost-effective hosting capabilities. We then customized the front-end to align with the platform’s unique artistic design, building custom components and enhancing the user experience through UX best practices, ensuring ease of use for all users. Additionally, we built a custom content management system that allows Perform Europe’s team to edit and update the platform independently.

One of the partners within the Perform Europe consortium developed the minimalistic design of the public website and platform. Since the unique, artistic design strongly deviates from the standard look and feel of standard components, we couldn’t use our usual front-end frameworks.

To solve this problem, we custom-built a lot of these components. This meant we were able to build exactly what Perform Europe wanted, and also use our UX expertise to further enhance the user experience of the platform. This includes helping users filling in forms correctly with labels, notifications, buttons for specific actions and more.

Independent content editing

Perform Europe also wanted a degree of independency when it came to the public website. After all, it would be inefficient to always have to rely on us every time they wanted to edit a page or add content. We re-used a lot of Firebase parts to quickly and reliably build a custom solution that lets Perform Europe editors edit web pages in a user-friendly way straight via the front-end.