Date: March 2008
Assanka has been busy this spring helping The Times to show you where you can eat out for a tenner. The newspaper's popular annual promotion, now in it's 10th year, has been given a Web 2.0 makeover, with the help of Assanka, and Google Maps.
Readers of The Times are eligible for a three-course meal at over 1,000 of the UK's restaurants by collecting tokens printed in the paper and on the website. Once the reader has four tokens, they can decide where to go by selecting from the list of participating venues printed in the paper at launch, or by using the interactive map search, throughout the duration of the campaign, that we developed for Times Online.
Taking Google's mapping system as a base, we added a comprehensive UK place name and postcode search engine, and a plotting system capable of real time sorting and clustering of markers to provide a great user experience. Additional usability features like automatic zoom-to-fit, choosing between similarly named places, and a conflict detection approach that guarantees no overlapping markers make this map stand out from the crowd.
Times Online's Claire Harford said:
We gave Assanka a tight deadline, and a complex brief for something we wanted to benefit from long term. This was the first time I have used Assanka as a supplier and I was pleased with their clear, thorough proposal, adherence to agreed deadlines and their overall client support. They have earned my trust as a supplier and I will be considering them for more work in the future.
The flexible integration options we designed will allow Times Online to use the same mapping facilities again and again for a variety of purposes. A straightforward but powerful administrative interface can deploy new map sets in under 5 minutes.
We just discovered what looks like a lovely Indian just down the road from our office in West London, so we're off to check it out. Cheers!