Introducing the Tallyo App: Decide Together

We make an estimated 35,000 decisions per day — many of them, of course, we make in an instant. But if you’re like me, there are a lot of times when you want to get a second opinion. Like…

• For the party, should I wear this red dress, or these jeans and T-shirt?
• Should I see the movie The Martian or Black Mass?
• Should I visit Boston or Washington DC for vacation?
• Should I get that new iPhone 6s in silver or rose gold?

Enter the Tallyo app. We’re thrilled to share the latest ArcTouch designed and developed app for iOS, which is now available in the App Store.

From the clothes you wear, gifts you buy, food you order, meetings you hold and even vacation spots you visit, every day we could use the help of our friends to make the right decision. Tallyo makes it easy to poll the people you trust in a fun, intuitive and incredibly easy-to-use new app. Simply choose a couple of photos, ask your question, and submit it to the friends and contacts you choose.

Curious people can ask their questions to the world, indecisive people can be reassured before making decisions, and friends can learn more about each other in a deeper way than before. In a similar way that Instagram changed the way people take photos, Tallyo will change the way people ask questions and give opinions.

“We had an early idea for an app, and the ArcTouch team did a tremendous job of helping us shape that idea into a first release that we think will resonate with a pretty broad audience,” said Brandon Agranovich, Tallyo’s co-founder. “We’re thrilled with the end result and proud of the design and experience the app offers to users.”

Tallyo App Strategy

The projects we work on are often in different stages when we start. Some projects for established companies are well defined and sometimes the UI work is complete — and in those cases, ArcTouch completes the app engineering and the back-end technical execution. Other projects are for exciting new mobile-centric startups, such as Tallyo.

When we started this project, the Tallyo team came to us with an idea and an open mind. The initial concept was focused on helping people choose between articles of clothing to purchase. The ArcTouch and Tallyo teams, working together through a multi-day strategy workshop, came to realize that there was a bigger opportunity to help in many other kinds of decisions — broadening the target audience.

From that workshop came the MVP (minimum viable product) definition for the first release, and the project moved quickly into the design phase.

Tallyo App Design – Focus on Tallying

The biggest challenge in designing this app was making the voting — or as we call it “Tallying” — rewarding and fun, yet intuitive. Like much of design, it was an iterative process. We started out with several concepts involving swiping gestures on the items. We implemented one interaction where the user could swipe away the item they didn’t like — but though we loved the use of the swipe gesture, we quickly realized through testing it might be counter-intuitive to some. Focusing the interaction on discarding the unwanted option also made the interaction feel too negative. We wanted it to be easy and enjoyable.

So, we simplified the voting interaction down to a double-tap — which is followed by a Tallyo logo animation that gives the user visual feedback that the tally was registered. This allows users to focus on the options they like best and provide feedback as quickly as possible. Simple and better.

Tallyo App Engineering – Leveraging Parse

Engineering the Tallyo app was pretty straightforward. The user interface is very clean, intuitive and familiar — thanks to our design team — without unconventional navigation flows or complex user interactions. To help power the app, we used Parse (from Facebook) as the backend platform.

We’re a big believer in platforms that save us and our clients time — Parse spared us a lot of server-side development. We were also able to take advantage of Parse’s included social plugins, notifications and data store capabilities. And, we’re using Parse to manage user data, which will give the Tallyo team flexibility to grow the app’s user base over time without having to worry about server issues.

Time to Go Tallyo

One of the great features of the Tallyo app is how you can choose the exact audience that you want to poll — it can be a small group of friends or a very public poll. We like it so much our design team is already using Tallyo to get feedback from internal stakeholders on different design concepts and UI elements in the apps we’re building.

The Tallyo app is free of charge. You can download it on the App Store, and start getting help on some of those difficult decisions right now. Comment below or tweet to us and let us know what you think!