nomtek

PONS GmbH is a publishing house with over four decades of experience in publishing language learning materials. The company is actively pursuing innovation paths to help users learn languages more effectively. Ever since nomtek partnered with PONS, we continue to innovate together and now proudly boast having worked on 3 projects together.

1) PONS Translate
Although PONS was proud of its renowned place in traditional publishing, the company needed to continue evolving to stay ahead in the market. They decided to digitally transform their vast libraries. What they needed was a scalable product that could seamlessly serve big audiences using different devices, and would offer features such as audio pronunciation, multi-language support, and text translation. We are proud to say that together we created PONS Translate, a flagship PONS product used by millions of users daily that has been downloaded by users over 8 million times.

2) PONS Vocabulary Trainer
After the initial success of the dictionary app, PONS decided to explore a new, more ambitious project — an app helping users expand their vocabulary. Nomtek successfully developed the PONS Vocabulary Trainer app, which is not only based on AI but also integrated with PONS Translate, using both previous dictionary searches and current exercises to individualize the learning experience.
Vocabulary Trainer became the 2nd most popular PONS’s mobile app, with a couple of million downloads of the app.

3) PONS XR Interpreter
The most disruptive project of the 3, PONS decided to tackle the issue of effective cross-language communication. Together with PONS, we decided to pursue this communication experiment based on mixed reality and artificial intelligence. The outcome of this project is An immersive POC powered by Magic Leap, which in the future can help various skilled workers communicate with each other in real-time, regardless of their language.

What does it take to make an augmented reality experience enjoyable? Great graphics, sure, but there’s also the interaction method: how easy is it to engage with the experience?

The interaction method defines that experience’s quality.

But the catch is in the context.

You can have playful and purposeful interactions in your AR experience.

In playful interactions, what matters is engaging with the content just for fun, without risking any consequences like lost points. The satisfaction comes from the interaction itself, not a correctly completed task in a set timeframe.

In purposeful interactions, you get satisfaction by performing tasks with enough accuracy or speed.

Defining what type of interaction dominates the augmented reality experience is key to picking the right interaction method and controller. A mismatch between a device, tool, or environment and the type of interaction has the potential to ruin the game.

Creating AR experiences is a subtle interplay between programming, visual arts, and gameplay design.

It's 2022 and today we had our first metaverse team meeting at nomtek!

Congrats team for not only preaching innovation, but actually living it.
Even Selma the cat made it on time!

And yes- the champagne was alcohol-free of course 😉

✂️ Cutting the scope of your project doesn’t have to mean you’re firefighting or lowering the bar just to meet the deadline of your project.

Sometimes it’s simply the smartest strategy to help you deliver your product as quickly as possible.

A great example of scope cuts working well is the recent app development we did for Superchat, a solution that aggregates Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram, Google Business Chat, email, and SMS into one inbox to create a simple customer communication experience for businesses.

We were very excited to help Superchat create a mobile solution for their product.
We started the project with an in-depth UI review of the designs, and when the review revealed a possibility for scope cuts, we went for it.
Instead of focusing on complex feature development– those can always be added once an app is active– we decided to focus on launching an MVP fast, so the product could get early traction. We kept styling, animations, and layout as simple as possible, time and resources at a minimum, all the while retaining the core components that would bring the most value to consumers.

In the end, scope cuts helped us release the product faster while preserving its functionality.

Only 6 months after the company was founded, Superchat completed a seed financing round, raising a total of €2.8M. Thanks to the successful MVP launch, the project continues evolving and serving a growing customer base.



Read our full case study:

Superchat — Messaging App Superchat aggregates communication channels for small and midsize companies. We partnered with Superchat to help them build a mobile application that makes communication between companies and customers even more efficient.