Qantas Cash re-launches with major upgrade for 2016
Qantas Cash - in conjunction with MasterCard, Prepaid Management Solutions and Wiliam - have re-launched their Australian website overnight, with a new responsive design replacing the original adaptive site. Based on the recent NZ application (live in late 2015) this tweaked and improved interface provides a much improved, simplified and engaging experience across all kinds of mobile devices.
It's sad to see the original 2013 application pulled down, having seen the program through so well from launch until now. It successfully enabled millions of Qantas Frequent Flyers to join Qantas Cash and facilitated billions of dollars worth of currency loads. However technology moves fast, and despite a sterling three years of service, the adaptive site needed to make way for it's newer, modern cousin.
With this release, Qantas Cash have also gone live with Debit Card payments, which means cardholders can use a VISA/MasterCard debit card to load money instantly, without waiting days for a Bank Transfer or BPAY to clear. To do this we have integrated successfully with the MasterCard web services, as well as the DataCash payment gateway for facilitating the payments to the NAB merchant account.
The release went off without a hitch, at 12:15am last night. This is a result of advanced (prior) planning around infrastructure and deployment strategy, which involved establishing a second production site behind a white-listed ‘curtain’ to run parallel alongside the existing adaptive site, which was still visible to the public. This arrangement was a risk-mitigation exercise to help bring in the project schedule, as well as to allow proper live-testing and regression to take place. It also meant the actual deployment would take place well in advance of the public ‘go-live’ and eliminated potentially a whole day of downtime, as we could simply enable a DNS change to divert the traffic from the old site to the new.
As far as deployments are concerned, it was basically a ‘hands-off’ experience for Wiliam; we did not even need to be present when it happened.
I would like to acknowledge those involved in the project. It is only due to the dedication, experience and professionalism of the team, that this project went as smoothly as it did, despite the numerous pitfalls along the way. The team’s ability to successfully and completely deliver ALL milestones, days in advance, despite a brutal schedule where the initial twelve (12) weeks of requested development and testing time was crushed into just seven (7) weeks... cannot go without mention. Yes you read that right. We managed to bring in the project earlier than scheduled, even after we were asked to bring it in by an additional five weeks.
UX
Anna, thanks for working through the requirements and prototyping the debit card load flow. Turned around in fantastic time, which allowed us to get ahead in design and then ultimately in development, which was crucial for allowing us to bring in the project delivery in the end.
Design
Ed, Jeff & Sandra, thanks for a fantastic job creating the new debit card load flows, tediously updating in-page copy and EDM content. I realise it’s not a lot of fun when we are spending so much time on the details, but when the client asks, expects and pays for pixel-perfect designs with content in-situ, that’s what we have to deliver, and you did a sterling job. It's important to get this right, especially when marketing and legal teams require this kind of visibility of the designs for content and legal sign-off.
Slice + Dev
Mark sliced the original site when it was launched for NZ, and also was very helpful when it came to troubleshooting QA issues with the AU replication.
Jason K + Matt C – together, putting in all the hard yards necessary to get this over the line. Able to keep the number of QA issues down to a manageable level throughout the whole project, so that at no point was the workload massively daunting. For the upgrading of the CMS to Umbraco 7 and the development work around debit card load and the payment integration, Jason was a super-star, helping out on-top of his other project commitments, with an enormous amount of time worked after hours and on weekends. This allowed him to successfully bring in the development of these components by easily a week each. To do this while working in a different time zone, on top of everything else, is just incredible commitment.
Once again, thanks to all involved. It’s great to see such a fantastic result for our biggest client, MasterCard, improving what is effectively our flagship web application.
