Good Dog Design

We recently had the opportunity to collaborate on an ambitious project with Vallarta Adventures, the largest, safest and most professional tour operator on Mexico’s Pacific Coast.

We were joined in this great undertaking by Vertebrae, a Bay Area-based branding company extraordinaire (and our next-door neighbors). The endeavor spanned more than a year, and Vertebrae’s team deserves enormous credit for arriving at a vigorous new identity that is in keeping with VA’s No. 1 standing in its marketplace.

Good Dog’s role was to define objectives for VA’s new website, as well as to develop the site’s structure and layout, create its information architecture, implement a more intuitive user experience, and engineer a back-end database system.

VA’s new tagline is “Inspired By Nature,” which leant itself to a great visual presentation. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so we chose to keep copy to a minimum, opting instead for broad panoramic images and plenty of white space to let them breathe. To create a more visceral feel, each photo features a person or group participating in an adventure.

 

In terms of the user experience, we streamlined the site’s architecture to provide intuitive and consistent navigation. We also employed rich media like video brochures, offline chats with agency representatives, third-party social networking, and blogs.

The breadth of activities VA offers is truly remarkable, so much so they once devoted a separate site to each individual experience. We opted to put the various adventures under one roof, with “Learn More” buttons taking the user to individualized landing pages with information on available dates, activity level, what to bring, and testimonials from past visitors.

Integrating an onsite reservation system was an enormous priority and challenge. VA wants more clients to book travel online, so designing an easy-to-use checkout process was crucial. The new site intergrates with VA's SAP reservation system via a customized series of data hooks.

Over the course of this venture, the travel industry was beset by a global economic downturn and the outbreak of the H1N1 virus. But VA remained committed to the project, for which they will always have our heartfelt respect. We ultimately created two sites:  Vallarta Adventures and another for Cabo Adventures.

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It’s always a thrill to partner with a company that’s the vanguard in its industry. Promptu is just such a company, and we’ve had the privilege of working with them on developing a number of iPhone and Androids applications.

Promptu is a leading innovator of voice recognition-based search and navigation services for mobile apps. They’re at an exciting time in their development, with analysts saying the company is at the tipping point for a mobile revolution fueled by Voice User Interface (VUI) applications.

Recently, as Promptu headed into a new round of fundraising and product launches, they determined that a site refresh was an immediate priority. Going forward, this new site would serve as a first line of information for the media, investors, customers, consumers and partners. 

Good Dog’s role on this project was to define the new site’s objectives, develop its visual design and produce templates to enable the site launch. We promised Promptu a look and feel that was cutting edge, with a dynamic presentation on the home page to showcase the Promptu product line. The design would be flexible, with information architecture that would improve access to and use of existing site features, and would facilitate the integration of future site tools and components.

The focal point of the new site is the lively presentation on the homepage, where Promptu rotates through its most relevant products to a front-and-center position. Coupled with each product is a customer or partner quote, turning third-party testimonials into headlines.

 

We were also charged with better relating that Promptu is an international company. To that end, we made the site available in five languages, and allowed space on the homepage for news Promptu is making globally. A text block in the lower left-hand corner states that Promptu’s easy-to-use voice-to-text solutions are available worldwide in 40 languages and dialects.

 

We were also charged with better relating that Promptu is an international company. To that end, we made the site available in five languages, and allowed space on the homepage for news Promptu is making globally. A text block in the lower left-hand corner states that Promptu’s easy-to-use voice-to-text solutions are available worldwide in 40 languages and dialects. Whereas their previous site was static (view a sceenshot), this one is dynamic and fluid, accurately conveying that Promptu is a company with momentum. View more screenshots in our portfolio.

 

It’s a joy to work with Promptu. Please check out their new site at http://www.promptu.com.

 

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For many years we've designed and developed interactive projects for consumer packaged food companies. We enjoy working with food and beverage companies, and love to exploring online brand expression.

We started brainstorming food and beverage products with usage that can be emulated on the phone. We focused on developing game concepts that took advantage of the iPhone's multitouch interface.

After developing some mockups we pitched a few clients, and soon found a brand who was looking to take the plunge into the world of apps. We leveraged their product's core usage characteristics with fun and simple gameplay, which in turn supported the product's key marketing messages. At the end of each game, users are given the chance to post their score to social networks, driving traffic back to the game

We see mobile apps as a great way to expand reach and provide consumers with fun and useful applications that engage them in a brand in new ways. With good apps, there's a strong viral opportunity that lets brands get their message out of their websites and into the hands of the end user (literally).

There are lot more iPhone apps in the pipeline, so follow us on Facebook or Twitter for more updates.

Trenitalia recently launched their newest mobile app: ProntoTreno. This iPhone App is powered by Promptu System's innovative voice recognition system, and allows users to quickly locate trains and stations simply by talking. ProntoTreno enables users to view train schedules, buy tickets and update bookings by phone, and it provides up-to-the-minute schedule info on thousands of trains.

The Good Dog team was responsible for the user experience design - we worked with the team at Promptu to port the feature set of an existing Blackberry Application to the iPhone platform. Along the way, we took advantage of the unique interaction opportunities available on the iPhone to create a seamless user experience. Once the wireframes were complete, we jumped over to visual design and created a modern look and feel to compliment the app's feature set.

Within three days of launching, ProntoTreno has been downloaded over 15,000 times and is the #1 free app on the Italian iTunes store. Its average rating is over 4 stars, and we're really pleased to see all the positive reviews.

We appreciate the teams' hard work on this app and send a special thanks to Scott Maddux at Promptu for guiding this project from concept to completion.

Check out more about the app at Trenitalia.com (Italian)
http://ti.promptu.com/index.php?display=prontoTrenoForApple

If you're in Italy, you can download the app right from the Italian iTunes store:
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=331050847&mt=8

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We recently launched a redesign site for Peter Belanger. Peter is one of the top studio photographers in the US; he's done amazing work for clients like Apple, Sony, Johnson & Johnson, Dwell Magazine and Macworld.

I met Peter on the first day at RISD (we were in the same dorm). Even though he should have known better, we became great friends, and it's been an honor to watch his business develop and grow. I really enjoyed working on his site, and we tried a number of interesting techniques to develop a strong platform to present his stunning work.

Right off the bat, we knew we had to create a full screen, scalable site that could show the work as a large as possible. Mark Martin, our talented developer worked to create a canvas-based system that seamlessly scales images to virtually any window size. This was all done without a single bit of Flash, a rarity for photographers' websites. The custom back-end was built in Ruby on Rails.

Beyond the portfolio, we also created a Blog and refreshed the stock site to work within the new design. So head on over and check out peterbelanger.com