Visual Abstract: Empowering Researchers & Changing Science Communication

Client

Visual Abstract

Country

Germany

Project duration

2021-Ongoing

Industry

Healthcare

Tech Stack

Python, Django (Cloud - AWS, DB - PostgreSQL)

The Challenge

Visual Abstract, a German organization that helps researchers make their work and message more impactful, approached us with the need to improve their internal work processes.

The company provides researchers and scientists with innovative visual abstracts that help draw attention to their publications, communicate the findings within seconds, and make a strong and lasting impact. Using such visual abstracts, researchers are able to increase the visibility of their articles by sharing them on social media, highlight the important sections with innovative illustrations, and boost the overall readability.

As Visual Abstract started growing and gaining more popularity among researchers, the workload of the team increased too. It was a no-brainer that a fresh and innovative approach was required to handle the internal task management. In their quest for a software partner, the choice landed on VOLO as a reliable software development company with extensive experience and long-lasting partnerships, to boot.

Visual Abstract needed help with the following challenges:

Building a tool that would help organize the whole flow of visual abstract creation,
Improvement of the internal team work and task distribution,
Seamless workflow at every step of the visual abstract creation: from receiving requests to delivering the abstracts to the customers.

After thorough research and discussions with Visual Abstract to better understand their short- and long-term goals, our team set upon building a product that would drastically change how internal operations are carried out at our new partner company.

The Solution

The overall development of this new software product was carried out in 3 phases. The whole product was basically completed within the first 2 phases, in about 6 months with a couple of intervals. Thanks to the professional approach from both sides involved, we achieved the desirable results and created a software solution that helps the Visual Abstract team organize the internal management of visual abstract requests as well as produce the final results based on the corresponding modifications.

The software was created from scratch using the initial version of an AI solution that they already had. The company’s existing solution lacked the necessary connections and configurations. Not to mention that nearly all internal operations and workflows were executed without any specific tool. Thus, by integrating their existing AI solution, we created a brand new tool to cover all of the aforementioned gaps in their business processes.

The final product offers the VA team the following functionalities:

Ability to create scientific visual abstracts using their AI solution
Receive visual abstract requests through the CRM tool created by our team
Enhance and fine-tune the automatically created abstract and send the final result to the customer

In other words, the tool enables the smooth and seamless implementation of the entire process of creating visual abstracts by integrating all of the required connections. It also helps the Visual Abstract team save time and monitor the end-to-end process in a more fruitful and effective way.

The scope of services provided by VOLO for Visual Abstract includes the following:

Software Development
Project Management
DevOps

As part of the 3rd phase, we also provide the company with monthly ongoing support and maintenance to keep their new software up-to-date and bug-free.

In Our Clients’ Words

We needed professional people and people that are good at communicating and supporting and developing something that doesn’t exist. What I most like about working with VOLO is the team - it’s a real team environment. There are a couple of metrics that qualify you as a partner, and VOLO really complies with all these metrics, as you would expect.