With partner agency Swanson Russell, we helped develop Minn Kota’s Select A Motor application, designed to help people find the right motor for their boat. Users enter info about their boat in a wizard format and view suggested motors compatible with their specifications and preferences.
“If you need an outboard motor for your freshwater or saltwater boat and don't know what kind you need, this is one of the easiest tools to use to figure that out,” said Nerdery programmer Ken Sykora.
On the design front, marketing/communications agency Swanson Russell sent us designs in Photoshop, which were sliced up at The Nerdery into XHTML and CSS. From there an app was developed to render it using ASP.NET.
The application was built on top of .NET 3.5 with the database work being done using SQL Server 2005 and the NHibernate Object Relational Mapping (ORM) framework. The Nerdery’s biggest challenge was converting Minn Kota’s motor data from an Excel spreadsheet into a useable model that we could write C# to interact with and query against. We solved this by developing a migration process to convert the data into a SQL Server Database format, and were able to leverage NHibernate to create a .NET Data Access Layer with very little code to write.
The coolest thing about this project is the slider component designed by Swanson Russell that scrolls the results and the implementation of the Back/Front/Move buttons that render some very nice animations that are a perfect use for this type of scenario. These actions present a very good user experience.
programmer, The Nerdery