Full Stack Technical Strategy: Kura
School and business journey orchestration for the mobile-first era.
This is Kura
Like Uber for buses, with a focus on safeguarding and carbon footprint reduction, Kura's mission is to help pupils and staff travel efficiently and transparently to their place of work. Ingenious geolocation tracking, super-smart scheduling and clever UX design make Kura one to watch in this high-growth sector.
Post-MVP acceleration
After an initial launch, Kura faced an array of feedback. Yes, the product was reassuring to parents, and yes, it was beneficial for schools. But something was missing. Bus drivers struggled with geolocation flows, user journeys were overly complex, and technical debt was damaging team productivity. Kura needed a diamond-sharp tech and product strategy to enhance the good and sweep out the bad. Enter Morrow.
The route to growth
Morrow worked closely with the Kura team to evolve a user experience design strategy that maximised MVP learnings while keeping within the limitations of COVID-19 lockdown. A critical early step was to contend with the disparate user groups. From bus drivers and teachers to parents and students, the app needed to reflect individual user priorities effortlessly.
We designed and developed three separate user interfaces: a drivers' app that's easy to use from a dashboard mount—another for parents to reassure them that their child is travelling safely—and finally, a student app to help them board the correct bus.
Inner beauty
Kura took full advantage of our Full Stack Technical Strategy service.
As a result, we completely overhauled the entire codebase for React Native, massively reducing technical debt and re-architecting the system for scale.
Using a mixture of proven best practices, modern tooling, and old-school engineering discipline, we authored a straightforward repository that dramatically reduced new feature time-to-market whilst being no-nonsense enough to quickly onboard new developers.
There were multiple hurdles to jump from an integration perspective. These included bespoke geolocation libraries and robust NFC support for checking students on and off.
Mapping is key to the smooth running of transport operations - we paired Mapbox with custom data layers to provide a clear geographic picture to all stakeholders.
“It was hard not to be impressed by
the team’s deep technical expertise.
I’ve worked with dozens of engineers over my career, but no one knows this space as deeply as Morrow does.”
Shaun Gabiel
CTO, Kura
A friendly goodbye
From day one, Kura made it clear that their long-term preference was to support the apps in-house. So, through a mixture of mentoring and support, we gradually transitioned all work back in-house and ensured the Kura team had everything they needed to succeed without us.
Kura today: confident industry leaders
Category leadership is increasingly built upon digital prowess, as Kura can attest. Now the largest home-to-school transport service in the UK, the brand has been elevated to sector pioneers.
Kura now transports over 15,000 students daily and provides commuter services to some of the UK's largest firms, including JustEat and ITV.
