The popular Lobola Calculator app has launched an enhanced user experience. Digital Peppa, the incubators of the app, took user, fan and media feedback to heart and introduced an improved version on Friday, 13 March 2015.
The first version of the Lobola Calculator app was launched in October 2014 and attracted over 74 000 downloads within the first four months, generating interest from across the globe.
The purpose of the app is to give users a unique taste of the time-honoured African wedding tradition known as lobola, where payment is made by a prospective husband or more often, by his family to the family of the bride.
The Lobola Calculator app is designed to calculate the users’ estimated bride or groom price, bringing the tradition of lobola into the digital age with a humorous twist.
Once users have responded to a series of questions, including how attractive they are, their level of education and their number of dependents, they receive a comical measure of how many cows they are worth.
In March 2015, the app will introduce a range of new features including the ability to invite social network followers to improve the users’ score, based on their social standing; a crazy cow to add to the entertainment value; a question to test users’ general knowledge and various funky cows that change based on the users’ value to share with their social networks.
“The new features are based on feedback from our users, fans and media comments,” says Donald Baillie, managing director at Digital Peppa, a full service mobile application development house and the developers of new and improved Lobola Calculator app. “We want to stay true to the fun experience introduced in the first release, whilst improving the user experience by adding game-like elements to the app.”
The second big change to the app is that it will offer advertising to companies that wish to target the app users and their social networks. In addition to this commercial offering, Digital Peppa is offering free advertising to E-deaf, an
organisation that specialises in the social and economic empowerment of the deaf community. This is aimed to generate exposure and support for the organisation through the app. “We are also welcoming other noteworthy charities to get in touch to access the free advertising and revenue generating opportunities,” Baillie explains.
Digital Peppa is further exploring paid-for branding opportunities where advertisers interested in reaching users with similar interests, attitudes, and opinions, can invest in advertising on the shared funky cow images, which will span Twitter, Facebook and Instagram with the potential of reaching hundreds of thousands of users. “The organisations who will benefit from talking to our users can then nominate a charity with whom they would like Digital Peppa to share revenue,” Baillie explains.
“What this means is that downloading this app will not just be about experiencing a proudly South African culture digitally, but users will be contributing towards supporting a worthy cause,” says Baillie.
