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MageCloud rescued and rebuilt Real Colors’ virtual assessment platform, delivering features previous developers called impossible and moving clients from paper to digital.
Real Colors is part of NCTI, a small US company with fewer than ten employees and two lines of business.
Personality assessment / HR tech
USA
Custom virtual assessment platform development, website management, ongoing support
Real Colors is a personality assessment tool HR and learning and development teams use for team building and communication. During the pandemic it had to launch a virtual product in a rush.
The product worked, but only just. MageCloud took over, stabilised the code, and delivered the features clients had asked for over five years, so more customers are moving from paper to the virtual assessment.
Real Colors is part of NCTI, a small US company with fewer than ten employees and two lines of business. One side focuses on behaviour change in the criminal justice system and is used mostly by probation officers. The larger side is Real Colors, a business-to-business personality assessment. HR professionals and L&D departments are trained to deliver it in their own organisations, using it for onboarding, ongoing team building and training. Healthcare is one of its biggest markets.
Ashley Miller joined the company in November 2020 as Technical Project Manager, responsible for the website, the virtual assessment and all outside vendors.
Before 2020, Real Colors didn’t have a virtual product at all. Clients ordered paper booklets, ran in-person workshops, or posted materials out to participants. A digital version had been on the radar for a while, but the pandemic forced the issue. To keep the business going, the company launched a virtual assessment on a very tight timeline.
The developers who built it came from a marketing company rather than a software development firm, and a virtual assessment was a very different kind of project for them. They delivered something that functioned in an emergency, but it had a lot of problems. Administering it involved heavy logistics for clients: getting participants to take the assessment, delivering their results, and combining the data. Meanwhile, competitors were far ahead in what they could offer virtually.
Real Colors stayed with the original team for a couple of years. Bugs were fixed here and there, but it became clear the product wasn’t going to move forward. The advanced features clients wanted simply weren’t going to happen.
“It functioned in an emergency. But we just weren’t going to get the advanced features and functionality we were looking for.” — Ashley Miller, Technical Project Manager, Real Colors
Ashley and the team took close to a year to find a new development partner. They wanted to get it right, because the platform was so different from a traditional ecommerce site and the back end was, as Ashley put it, a mess. Many of the companies they spoke to only wanted to handle marketing and wouldn’t touch the virtual product.
They interviewed vendors from India, Europe, and the United States. Price was a factor, and US agencies were charging around three times as much while also being harder to reach and more rigid. But price wasn’t the deciding factor. With some lower-cost teams, communication was difficult, and they didn’t seem to understand what Real Colors needed. Peers with large websites kept pointing Ashley towards European companies.
When she met Paul and the MageCloud team, she felt confident straight away. The team looked at the back end and the virtual assessment and said they could manage it, even though it was very different from typical ecommerce work. Their Trello-based project management was organised and transparent, which mattered for a small team without in-house developers. MageCloud offered the right balance of skill, organisation, cost and accessibility.
“When we met with Paul and his team and saw the way they function using Trello, the way they project-managed, I just felt very, very comfortable and very confident that they would be able to take over this project for us.” — Ashley Millerю” — Ashley Miller, Technical Project Manager, Real Colors
Most underperforming ecommerce email isn’t badly written. It’s over-built — carrying navigation, multiple colour systems, and desktop-length paragraphs into a format where people give you about eight seconds and one thumb.
Strip it to one image, one colour, one action per screen, and the same products start doing the work.
MageCloud’s first phase was a project rescue. The team took time to learn how the virtual assessment had been built and how it worked, cleaning up the inherited code and fixing the bugs that stopped core features from working properly. This groundwork wasn’t glamorous, but it gave both sides a stable foundation and a deep understanding of the product.
With the platform stable, the focus moved to new functionality. Over the second half of the year, the team developed a series of updates designed to make the assessment more efficient for clients and to reduce the admin involved in running it, from managing participants to delivering results and combining data. In December 2025, Real Colors launched phase two of its virtual instrument. Some of the new features were things the previous developers had said couldn’t be done.
MageCloud also manages the wider website and provides ongoing support and is ready to help with the SEO and marketing side as Real Colors’ new marketing manager builds out that area.
2. Significant time savings for the HR and L&D teams running assessments.
3. Virtual sales growing as clients move from paper (previously about two-thirds of sales) to digital.
4. The small in-house team now focuses on the product instead of firefighting.
“In December, we launched phase two, functionality our clients have been asking for for five years. The amount of time it’s saving our clients is really remarkable.” — Ashley Miller
Book a strategy call about custom development and project rescue, or email [email protected] to talk it through.
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