Case Study

How IDCreator Built A Web App To Make Over 1 Million ID Cards

Product Description

IDCreator is a web application where users can customize hundreds of templates or create an ID card for employee identification from scratch. In addition to that, people can also download the assets, buy materials to print the cards themselves, or purchase additional accessories.

The tool doesn’t require the user to install or buy any custom software to have an ID card. IDCreator serves various industries from hospitals, schools, newspapers, non- profit organizations, and government agencies, to any kind of business that requires identification badges.

The Project

As browsers started announcing that they would no longer support Adobe Flash and search engines were already favoring websites without this technology, IDCreator saw the need to rewrite their website. Since they were using Flash, their web application could suffer from performance and traffic loss. Back in 2012, when it was first built, Flash multimedia software platform was largely used in many websites, but as web applications evolved, safer and more accessible technologies arrived, such as HTML5. Thus, IDCreator chose Scopic to work on updating the tool from Flash to HTML5 while maintaining its main features. They decided that a team of expert developers would be the best fit to offer them a more extensive range of services.

“Our customers vary from small organizations of just a few people to large government agencies. Because of this, we needed a versatile program that was able to work in many different situations. We needed a team of developers who could understand our needs as well as our customer’s needs” – Sam Colvin, President of IDCreator.

The initial scope of the project included the improvement for the badge maker, as well as bug fixes for better user experience. “We wanted an effective and affordable solution to create and maintain our program”, says Sam Colvin, IDCreator president. Since then, Scopic has kept on working on upgrades and third-party integrations, among other improvements.

The Challenges

The Flash to HTML5 update needed to be as frictionless as possible while integrating with their e-commerce of choice and migrating all the users’ data. As soon as we started working on the development of this project, Scopic and IDCreator were faced with customization and integration challenges.

For IDCreator, it was crucial to update the app without impacting the user experience while maintaining the high quality of the product. One of the challenges the team faced was the need for custom behavior in the application, such as integrations and actions. The new version of IDCreator needed a custom webshop functionality to be integrated with its e-commerce platform, Magento. However, this functionality was not covered by Magento’s core code, nor could it be implemented with existing extensions. Additionally, to maintain the application’s features, IDCreator also required the use of a previously developed AngularJS application, not compatible with the Magento2 JS code version that would be implemented.

In short, Scopic needed to make changes to the app to keep user experience the same but using Magento to later improve it, integrate their e-commerce, migrate to HTML5, and improve the badge maker functionality.

The Approach

Scopic’s team performed some rounds of research and coordinated with the client to solve the challenges faced. During this process, regular discussions to align expectations and report on the progress of the work were crucial for the overall success of the project and client satisfaction.

The Solution

The Scopic team crafted a custom solution to address the integration with the e-commerce platform and IDCreator was successfully updated to an HTML5 version with Magento2 and AngularJS tech stacks. Some custom functionalities in PhantomJS used in the designer page, as well as a custom logic implementation to generate high-quality PDF files, were also implemented.

Technology Stack

The Outcome

The outcome of the collaboration between IDCreator and Scopic was not only an updated version of the software but also a tool to enable their business growth. Most importantly, the transition went over smoothly as the users were not affected, and all the data and members’ info were safely migrated to the new version.

“Our main product is custom printed ID cards. At the heart of our business lies our online designing tool that allows our customers to create their company’s template. Scopic has been able to create an easy-to-use program that our customers really appreciate and has allowed us to grow our business. We now print ID cards for small businesses all around the world. We have helped over 100,000 customers create more than 1,000,000 ID cards” – Sam Colvin, President of IDCreator.