React: Bracket App
What I did
A coworker and I built a bracket-style voting app using React and styled-components.
Context
Each year, we ran a bracket-style competition similar to the college March Madness tournament. During the voting period, users vote on the digital books that they want to go on sale. The longer the book stays in the tournament, the deeper the discount it gets at the end of the tournament.
My coworker and I decided to rebuild the voting app from scratch because some of the tech that we relied on was becoming deprecated and it was not mobile-friendly. We worked on it a few hours a week for a couple of months, organizing the work on Trello. The new app is much more stable, mobile responsive, and adds additional functionality.
Business impact
The promotion that is run using this app earns about $1.5 million per year for the company.
Rebuilding the app was essential to the promotion's continued success. The technology was old, and previous years were rife with bugs, which disrupted sales.
The new app added two new features which were huge for Marketing:
- The way that we set up the voting allowed Marketing to target messaging to users based on their votes. For example, if someone voted for a book and then it went on sale later, we could send them an email letting them know.
- Round changes could be scheduled ahead of time and winners and losers are computed for you, saving development and marketing resources each year and making the app more stable during time zone changes.