Good Dog Design

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Wendy's, one of Australia's iconic franchises, contacted us with an interesting question.  Could we develop an online ordering system that would allow users across Australia to buy and pick up Ice Cream Cakes from the Wendy's store of their choice? Could we do this even though each store has only a phone line with no fax or internet capabilities?

After a whirwind of activity and hard work we are excited to launch the new website and e-commerce store. Working with the Wendy's team we designed and developed a deliciously fun new site for this Australian icon.   We also developed an innovative e-commerce feature that allows users to order and buy Ice Cream Cakes that they can pick up from the Wendy's of their choice.

Using a mix of web and custom built apps, Good Dog has developed 'Phoneology' which results in online orders taken by the site being placed and read out to the specific stores via an automated phone call.  The orders are placed into a queue and delivered at set points during the day. Employees  at the store can listen and record receipt of the order or have the option for the application to call back in one hour if they are too busy. 

The custom made application also delivers SMS and email notices to the store owners, as well as notifying Wendy's Head Office if an order is not marked as received by the individual store.

Why not try it for yourself today? These cakes are delicious!

We have had once again had the pleasure to be part of the design and development team for a Media-Sync iPad App.   ABC's Gray's Anatomy Sync iPad App  allows fans to  go deeper with polls, trivia, behind-the-scenes, photo galleries, check-in to show locations, and share with friends through Twitter and Facebook.

The technology is based on Nielsen's Media-Sync Platform. An embedded audio signal in the television show allows the app to access encoded information and then deliver a groundbreaking media experience to iPad users. There's been lots of interesting buzz about this project - you can read more about it here:

• Mashable “Grey’s Anatomy” Fans To Get an Interactive Viewing Experience on iPad

Good Dog worked with the Nielsen team to develop the user interface, and design a mini site for the photo and video galleries. The final app was developed by the amazing team at Gravity Mobile. The overall project was a huge team effort, and there was plenty of hard work put in by ABC Digital and Nielsen to get the app ready for release.

iPad Photo ©Peter Belanger Photography

We're really excited about the release of ABC’s My Generation Sync iPad App. This one-of-a-kind app uses the TV audio signal to deliver a synchronized interactive television experience to iPad users. In other words, it's magic!

The technology is based on Nielsen's Media-Sync Platform. An embedded audio signal in the television show allows the app to access encoded information and then deliver a groundbreaking media experience to iPad users. There's been lots of interesting buzz about this project - you can read more about it here:

• ABC My Generation Site iPad Promo Video 

• Nielsen Wire Nielsen and ABC’s Innovative iPad App Connects New “Generation” of Viewers

• CNN International My Generation iPad app syncs with TV

• ReadWriteWeb An iPad App that Stays in Sync with Your TV

• Mashable ABC’s New iPad App Syncs with TV for Interactive Programming

• MacWorld My Generation app displays content in sync with episodes

We were honored to be part of the design and development team on this fresh type of iPad application.

Good Dog initially worked with the Nielsen team to develop concept art that was used for pitches to the networks. These comps were customized for each presentation, and were focused on individual shows.

Good Dog also worked on the initial iPad prototype. Our team developed a working prototype that used watermark detection technology via the iPad's internal mic. The prototype demonstrated how the actual encoded audio could be used to trigger events within the app.

The final app was developed by the amazing team at Gravity Mobile. We were impressed with their dedication and ability to get the app built, tested and delivered within an extremely tight timeline. The overall project was a huge team effort, and there was plenty of hard work put in by ABC Digital and Nielsen to get the app ready for release.

During the final build, we continued to provide visual design and prototype art. Good Dog built an additional prototyping tool to help the teams at ABC and Nielsen quickly test content scenarios, enabling them to simulate the synchronized interactive experience.

We want to give a huge thank you to Scott Maddux at Nielsen. His enthusiasm and endless drive really brought this app to reality. We're also amazed at ABC's dedication to the project. They were the first network to really recognize the potential of this approach, and their dedication and support have been inspiring.

iPad Photo ©Peter Belanger Photography

Our first Android project is now live. ShoutOUT (from Promptu) is a free speech recognition app that lets you compose text messages in natural speech instead of typing. You can learn more about ShoutOUT on the product site.

We worked with Promptu to port the existing iPhone ShoutOUT App to Android.

Getting Started
We’ve designed and developed for the iPhone, but Android was new to us. To familiarize ourselves with the platform, we experimented with a handful of Android apps on an HTC Magic phone. Specifically, we were interested in mobile apps that were originally designed for the iPhone, and were then ported to Android. We researched how designers and developers handled the transition, and identified best practices for development.

Findings
Although the iPhone and Android phones are both touch-based, there are several differences that impacted our design translation:

Menu Bar

iPhone productivity apps generally have a dedicated menu bar for navigation, but Android leverages the ‘Menu’ button to display contextual navigation. Both methods work, but we removed the iPhone-style menu to make the app behave more like other Android apps.

Physical Buttons
Since Android phones have dedicated ‘Home,’ ‘Menu’ and ‘Back’ buttons. Physical buttons have their pros and cons, but we used the ‘Menu’ button to move items that were in the iPhone menu bar into the contextual menu overlays. This enabled us to gain a bit of real estate that was originally reserved for the Menu Bar. Since the Menu button’s features varied based on the screen, we mapped out all of the potential scenarios. It was difficult to keep the behavior consistent, and while we were concerned that some menu items could potentially be lost, we assumed Android users would be familiar with this pattern since it’s a core part of the native apps (such as Mail, Contacts...etc.)

The other physical button that needed attention was the back button. Initially, it’s behavior seemed fairly defined, but there were a number of instances where we had to workout the best response. This was especially important if the user was in a modal-input view, we didn’t want to users to loose any input by a mistaken push.

Physical Scroll
The Android handset invites multi-modal input. The physical trackball allows users to precisely scroll up and down lists, and it also allows selection via a physical click. Our design needed to take these methods of scrolling and selection into consideration, since they don’t exist on the iPhone.

Fragmentation
Designing specifications for iPhone and iPod Touch is pretty simple (for now). Every application will work the same way across each model since they support the same features. The Android platform is more complicated. The handset makers support different hardware and features, and subsequently the carriers can customize Android and add proprietary UI elements (to distinguish their phones from the competition). The fragmentation issues added complexity to the design task, as we worked out which base set of features we could rely on across all the targeted handsets.

Design
The visual design translation was much more straightforward. We were able to migrate the main UI elements from the iPhone app directly to Android. We did modify the button styles to make them look and feel like Android elements, and we also created specific icons to support the contextual buttons (although many icons were freely available from the Android library).

Screenshots
Taking screenshots with Android was a huge pain. This may have changed with newer handsets, but the only way we could get images from the phone to our desktops was really complicated. We did appreciate some great directions over at Download Squad (via Christina Warren @ Download Squad).

Takeaways
The Android OS is a highly viable platform, and it has already proved a commercial hit in the mobile space. From a designer’s point of view, it’s fairly easy to ‘think’ in Android, and many successful iPhone applications can and will be ported to Android.

We worked with Alibris to develop the look and feel for their updated book search.

The main goal of the search redesign was to improve the organization and presentation of search results, and incorporate modern front-end web technologies to enable Alibris customers to quickly find the right book.

The Alibris team completed extensive research and wireframing on the search pages, and  also engaged in user testing to define the project requirements. The Good Dog team developed the visual design, and produced the final seach templates.

Head on over to Alibris to learn more about the latest release:
http://www.alibris.com/blog/alibris/a-new-book-search-at-alibris