Loki Mobile Application: Connecting Small Businesses and Consumers in the Digital Age

In the current digital marketplace, local small businesses and consumers encounter challenges in establishing an online presence and discovering trustworthy services respectively. The Loki mobile application, presented in this work, aims to reduce the disconnect between these parties through specific features and tools in a mobile application that address each party’s concerns. Small businesses and individual service providers such as barbershops, private tutors, babysitters, and house cleaners, often face difficulties garnering attention from their communities and executing social media marketing campaigns with limited financial and human resources. Consumers struggle to filter through the abundance or lack of online information about businesses to find reliable reviews and choose where to acquire their services. The Loki mobile application intends to serve as a forum for community-driven reviews through which businesses build their public image and enhance the visibility of their services. This comprehensive system encourages verified reviews that foster consumer trust and promote local economic growth. For an application of this complexity to be developed, the creation of aesthetic and intuitive user interfaces in frontend development is significant to the success of the platform’s mission. However, constructing a scalable, maintainable, and secure backend infrastructure is fundamental to transforming these static pages into operational interfaces through which the users can interact and reap the benefits. The intentional decisions for technologies and frameworks selected for the application development and design choices relating to the organization and structure of routes, entities, and controllers contributed to achieving this goal. Next, performance testing was conducted in a local development environment by simulating heavy-load conditions to determine whether the backend server could handle increased traffic without impacting response times and error rates. The limitations that were identified include the steps that can be taken for performance optimization and the need for cloud-based solutions before the application is pushed to production. The lessons learned from the initial performance testing emphasize the importance of building a backend infrastructure that is scalable and maintainable to meet the dynamic needs of small businesses and consumers. Future efforts for the Loki platform involve thoroughly evaluating the application’s functionalities and user experience and testing the application against the same performance metrics before being released to the app stores. Additionally, the development team of the Loki mobile application will prioritize refining existing features and introducing new ones based on real user feedback.