Our partner is a clinic that helps people work on their diet, weight, and overall wellness. With the global pandemic, they had to close 3,000 physical locations and were no longer able to hold their meetings in person. In addition, due to the increase of people working from home without the ability to exercise in their clinics, it became crucial to find a way to provide this service online, swiftly, to ensure the continuation of business amidst the new conditions.
Our customer decided they needed to create an app to run on Zoom meeting service to make it easier for their members to participate. This new app would show recommendations to users regarding meals, snacks, exercise, and things they could be doing while attending either personal or work meetings.
To address this challenge, we created a web app that runs on the Zoom platform. It appears on the right side of the screen after the member logs in with their credentials. Our client needed to be able to modify the information that appeared in the application as needed. The goal was to create an easy-to-use app that would be able to personalize the content depending on how it was accessed.
Challenges
- When this project started, Zoom was still developing the Zoom Platform and finalizing the standards for the Zoom App marketplace.
- Due to the early stages of the Zoom App Marketplace standards, documentation had not yet been released, resulting in the discovery of new issues and app limitations.
- To address the business requirement that the content be easily modified, the team had to introduce an easy-to-use content management system (CMS)
Solution
Tackling this challenge required us to leverage several JavaScript applications and libraries, including Strapi, Next.js, and Redis.
- Strapi: Our selection for the CMS was a headless CMS called Strapi. It is an easy-to-use and set-up open-source content management system. Strapi offers easy record creation to support all the record types identified across the application. Additionally, there are plugins available to fulfill other requirements such as having an HTML-based text editor.
- Next.js: For the JavaScript application itself we used Next.js. It is a lightweight framework very similar to React. We used Next.js as it solves the routing challenges quite easily. Having a server-side rendering was a nice-to-have improvement since there was uncertainty about the performance restrictions of Zoom Apps.
- Redis: Selected to handle a session when connecting our Next.js app within Strapi and all other APIs that we could be hitting. Redis was a good fit to store this information and support future app improvements.
Last but not least, we worked with Zoom SDK to be able to deploy the application and have it up and running on Zoom.
The App
To access it through Zoom, you click on the new section called Apps and there you can run the application. The app also has some reminders that you can set while being in a Zoom meeting such as “taking time to move around”.
The application gives snack recommendations, water tracking, food recipe recommendations, and exercises the user can do while in a meeting. The exercises are shown with animations developed by the Oktana design team.
Results
The app allowed our customer to continue their business by transferring their client’s needs to a digital environment. The app is accessed through Zoom and, within weeks during the pandemic, the company successfully transitioned its 30,000 weekly workshops to a virtual format.
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