PHORCE
THE WORLDS FIRST SMARTBAG
THE WORLDS FIRST SMARTBAG
Phorce is a successful kickstarter project that developed the world's first ‘smart bag’. The bag is equipped with a lot of features and has a large (26.000 mAh) battery inside equipped with bluetooth. The bag connects with the Phorce App to see how many times a mobile device can be charged by the battery and alert the owner when forgetting their bag.
If you travel for your work your office is mobile. Working during a long flight sounds great but impossible because your device is quickly out of battery. Also losing a bag would be a disaster for you and your company and risks security issues.
The biggest challenge of Phorce was to rethink the concept they started the kickstarter project. The idea itself was only to equip a bag with a large battery, but adding a bluetooth chip would enable a lot of new features. The deadline was quick and time to develop features was short. This meant we needed to prioritise the most useful ideas and make them usable in the app and connect with the hardware.
Phorce was my second ‘connected devices’ project. The stakeholder gave me the freedom to rethink the concept and came up with new added features. These features aren’t available yet in the live version yet but a roadmap was created for future releases. The hardest part of this project was the different alerts users receive. Every status had to be unique and shouldn’t be annoying for the user. Due to a tight deadline the overall app experience is great but not yet what I hoped to.
