Willamette Week: Hotseat: Raven Zachary

Posted by rinzai on 14 August 2009 @ 17:49 PT

Catching up on a backlog on Small Society blog posts…I was recently featured in the one of Portland’s arts papers, Willamette Week. The Hotseat format is essentially a Q&A with an individual in Portland. I was selected by the paper for the July 15th, 2009, issue. I have linked to the online version of the article for those of you who are interested in reading the interview.

Whole Foods: our most drool-inducing project yet

Posted by James Keller on 2 July 2009 @ 14:22 PT

Raven and I have been known to pass travel time by making the short list of folks/brands that we’d like to work with someday, but from day one of Small Society, there was one company that Raven was passionate about making an app for…

Whole Foods Market has always kept the citizens of Small Society stocked with Kombucha (those of you who know us will understand how serious this is), and both Raven and Jon spent some time living in Austin, Texas, home of Whole Foods and their absolutely gorgeous flagship store. So, this year when Raven was in Austin to moderate the “iPhone: The New Gaming Platform” panel at SXSW, he and I decided to swing by headquarters to have a quick meet and greet with their team.  Lucky for us, it was a great meeting, and we kicked off just a few weeks later.

When we started thinking about how to bring the Whole Foods brand to life in the mobile space, there was a lot of passion about the content available in their recipe database.   Whole Foods has a core mission to bring fresh and healthy food to their customers - and so it makes sense to help those customers transform that food into a nourishing meal that they can share with friends and family around the table.

Our only concern was that there were already some recipe apps available on the app store.  But, after discussing it, we all agreed that the exact same brand values that make Whole Foods different than your average grocery chain would help differentiate the app itself.  We focused the user experience on these key criteria - for example, the recipe search has a filter that supports special diets such as vegan, dairy free or sugar conscious, and the recipes call for quality, whole ingredients.

We also wanted to flip the recipe finder concept on its head a bit.  As much as I’d like to tell you that I pre-plan each week’s meals and shop ahead, the project team agreed that most of us don’t usually approach dinner that way.  Instead, most of us open the freezer, fridge, and pantry door and rely on our creativity to make something work.  It was this paradigm that inspired the “on hand” feature that allows you to choose up to three ingredients and the app provides recipes that leverage what you already have available.

Our app launch was timed perfectly with the launch of the iPhone OS 3.0 Software Update, so the Whole Foods app was built using key new Apple technologies such as MapKit for the store finder, in-application email for sharing favorite recipes, and the ability to copy recipe data using Cut, Copy, Paste functionality.

(Please note that because we used these awesome 3.0 technologies, your device needs to be on 3.0 for the app to work. If you haven’t already done so, upgrade, it’s worth it… we promise!)

On its first day in the app store, it was hailed as a Staff Favorite.  We are also very proud to announce that it is currently Apple’s App Store Pick of the Week.

It was awesome working with the Whole Foods team, and we hope that as you read this you are happily snacking on Strawberry Shortcakes with Maple Syrup and Frozen Yogurt.  Wait, you aren’t?  Better download the app (after all, it’s free!)

One Big Step for One Small Society

Posted by James Keller on 19 June 2009 @ 16:42 PT

So here’s the thing… Small Society is the type of agency that believes that great people with a great idea can make a great app - but if you add just a dash of process garnered from years of experience making software, it can take that app from great to outstanding. We also fundamentally believe that in these young, Wild Wild West days of iPhone applications - having a strong process really sets us apart from many of our peers.

That being said, every once and awhile, an opportunity comes along that requires you to let go just a little bit and follow your heart.

Last week, we had the honor of having some of our work onstage at Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC). The Apple keynote has found its way into pop culture - having been parodied by everyone from 30 Rock to the College Humor crew - but to an Apple fan, it’s far more than that. Leading up to the keynote most Apple fans have already spent countless hours reading up on the rumors, trying to guess what the new announcements will be. For those who are not lucky enough to attend the keynote live, most fans will endlessly hit reload as one of the big Apple sites live blogs the entire event. So for us, the geeks who have dedicated our careers to this platform, an opportunity to help build one of the keynote showcase apps is an incredibly awesome experience.

It was this opportunity that inspired us to throw our usual user-centered design process out the window and join our friends at Zipcar for a crazy five-week sprint to bring a prototype of the Zipcar application to life. Our lead developer (Jon) and our fearless leader (Raven) went through a similar sprint on the Obama ‘08 iPhone application, and so the team was confident that there was enough time to get some solid code written, but our challenge was in understanding the Zipcar customer (25% of whom have iPhones!) and what they would want from this app, while at the same time leveraging brand new technologies to highlight the iPhone 3.0 OS.

Needless to say, we were excited. The weekend before the kick-off meeting in Cambridge, Jon had already implemented MapKit as a means to locate cars. On the plane home immediately following our kick-off, I had developed a first draft of the wireframes. From there, we were iterating the app almost daily, side by side with the Zipcar team, who were providing design, server development, and moral support every step of the way.

It was a crazy timeline, and the sprint wasn’t without a few tense and tiring moments, but in the end we built something that the whole team is quite proud of. We leveraged the best of 3.0 technologies including MapKit and Push Notifications, while at the same time bringing out the brand personality of Zipcar and keeping true to the ideal iPhone user experience. Luckily, Apple was pleased with our progress.

Perhaps the most talked about feature of the prototype was the ability to honk the horn and even unlock the car. Thanks to technology already built into the Zipcar fleet, it was possible to do some pretty amazing work in an incredibly short period of time. We were also lucky enough to not only see the demo live on stage at WWDC, but help the Zipcar team demo the technology for our fellow devs inside the Moscone center on Tuesday and Wednesday of the conference. (It was also pretty cool to be trending topic on twitter, if even briefly, amid all of the other cool announcements.)

Watch the Zipcar demo at the WWDC 09 keynote

Also, check out media coverage of the demo:
Wired (http://www.wired.com/autopia/2009/06/zipcar-iphone/)
Mashable (http://mashable.com/2009/06/08/iphone-30-apps/)
The Apple Blog (http://theappleblog.com/2009/06/09/zipcar-car-sharingrenting-with-your-iphone/)

We’d like to thank Apple for giving Zipcar (and us, by proxy) the opportunity to participate in the keynote, and for giving us such an awesome platform to work with. And, of course, we’d like to thank Zipcar for being an outstanding client. Not only is Zipcar changing the way we think about transportation as the largest car-sharing service in the world, but the people who work for Zipcar truly embody the company brand - they are smart, fun and passionate.

We feel lucky to have been a part of such a crazy endeavor, but are all just a tiny bit relieved to have a little extra time to catch up on all of that sleep we missed.

smallsociety.com for iPhone

Posted by rinzai on 31 May 2009 @ 21:45 PT

I spent this weekend putting IUI through its paces and have launched an iPhone optimized version of smallsociety.com. Browse from your iPhone or iPod touch to take a look. I have some JavaScript browser detect code on the index page which redirects these devices to an optimized site instead (in the /m/ path). I made a number of tweaks to the standard IUI code to get the presentation I wanted.

Kudos to Joe Hewitt and the other IUI contributors for making this code available.