Apple Design Award winners for hire

Lots of people know that at Tapity we have built some of our own successful apps, but few know that we also partly fund our product development by working with a small number of clients each year.

We very rarely market our client services, but with the new year starting, we are looking for a handful of great clients. To that end, I thought I would post an unconventionally promotional article about why you might want to hire us for your next mobile app or web app.

We build successful products for a living

Languages peaked as the #5 app on the whole App Store

We are not an agency. We are a product company that sometimes helps other companies build products. There are benefits to that:

• We are only seven people, so when you work with us, you are working with the very same people who built Grades (Apple Design Award), Languages (Best of 2012), and Hours (#1 business).
• We are not “yes men”. It is in our DNA to build successful products so we are not afraid to challenge ideas and think about things differently, because that is what we do with our own team.
• We provide insight into every aspect of building a successful product, whether it is helping you hone your product definition or create a marketing strategy. Because we think about these things every day for our own products, we can’t help but view your product from multiple angles.

We are design focused

Designing Hours for the Apple Watch was a unique challenge

Hours did not succeed because it was a novel idea (not that there is anything wrong with novel ideas). Hours has been making waves in the crowded time tracking space because we started with the human problems with time tracking — forgetting to track your time, the inconvenience of tracking time, the hassle of finding and correcting mistakes—and solved them through thoughtful, iterative design that aimed to delight.

We believe that there is so much opportunity out there in enterprise, health care, education, and countless other verticals where problems can be solved through great product design, and we hope that we can help you do that.

This article I wrote for Smashing Magazine walks through the design process we went through to build Languages, an app that got up to #5 overall on the App Store.

That is the same process we like to go through with clients.

Track Record

Though we are small, we’ve had an impact on the industry. Our major accomplishments include:

Grades

An app that put some fun into managing your classes and priorities.

• Won an Apple Design Award in 2011
• Was featured by Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, Mashable, Consumer Reports, and dozens of others.
• Reached the #1 spot for Education and has close to half a million downloads.

A sampling of the coverage Grades received

Languages

An offline translation app.

• Peaked as #5 app on the whole App Store
• Recognized by Apple as a Best of 2012 app for Intuitive Touch
• Featured on the App Store home page and dozens of other places on the App Store
• Over 300k paid downloads
• “Destined to win an Apple Design Award” — The Next Web
• “Thoroughly impressed” — 9to5 Mac
• “From the moment you start using Languages, you know that a lot of work, heart, and soul was poured into it” — iMore
• Smashing Magazine Case Study on how we designed it
• Another Smashing Magazine Case Study on how we marketed it

Hours

A time tracker you will actually use.

• Featured by Apple on the App Store front page multiple times, on their App Store social media pages, and even demo devices in Apple Stores around the world
• “The Perfect iPhone Time Tracking App” — Forbes
• “Hours Is a Simple, Elegant Time Tracking App That’s Easy to Use” — LifeHacker
• “Those who have to keep track of how they spend their time working during the day can’t do much better on iOS than Hours” — TechCrunch
• Case study on how Hours became a top grossing app
• We have been working on a web app version that will be coming out soon

Hours pretty much dominated the App Store when it launched

A sampling of the coverage Hours has received

Our services — building apps and web apps

Here is what we can do for you. We use a very similar process whether we are working on an app, a web app, or an entire platform. These stages are somewhat sequential but they overlap and inform one another.

• Analyze your problem area from a UX perspective. Depending on time and budget, we can go as deep as interviewing users, developing personas, and doing experience maps. The goal is to refine the definition of your product and get a thorough understanding of the problems your potential users face. We like to do this in an intensified in-person workshop.
• Design the interactions. We use a whiteboard to brainstorm the design for the main screens. This is where a lot of the design magic comes in to craft something that matches the user’s mental models, quickly conveys the app’s value proposition, and is easy to use.
• Emotional design. Great apps aren’t just usable, they are enjoyable to use. As we refine our wireframes, we think about how to use appropriate metaphors, aesthetic visuals, engaging text, animation, and sound to build your app’s personality. It is the most superficial level of design but probably the most fun part.
• Development. Our team is small and is focused heavily on design and front-end development, so whether you use us to do development, use our partner, or hire someone else will depend on the project and our availability. We have in-house expertise with iOS development and front-end web development, including building complex web apps.
• Business Strategy & Marketing. We understand that building a great product is only half the battle. You need to execute a solid business plan, including monetization and marketing. We can help you form a strategy and can also help you execute it. This can involve website landing page design and development (and other marketing collateral), helping you put together a compelling pitch to the press, and even direct PR services.

Let’s talk

We only have a few spots available in Q1 2016 so get in touch now: jeremy@tapity.com

P.S. We are not a budget option, but we are nowhere near the most expensive either. For the sake of your time and ours, I should let you know that unless your budget is in the low five figures minimum, we are probably not the right fit for your project. We are currently investing heavily in Hours and cannot take on any other partnership type arrangements at this time.

P.P.S. We hail from Charlotte, NC (you may have heard of it recently) but work with clients around the world.