Austin- and Seattle-based Big Machine in the Sky approached Typeoneerror with an original idea to create an application that kept track of who owes who in the social currency of drinks, lunches and dinners using digital IOUs.
Big Machine in the Sky provided us with a series of wireframes and initial design direction including the logo, token icons and color palette. From there we designed the user interface and strategized how the application would work technically, eventually settling on an application stack using Ruby on Rails, Amazon RDS, and Mongo DB.
Once we outlined how we envisioned the application working and completed design, we developed a test-driven API on Ruby on Rails and began developing the iOS Application which is powered by the Facebook API. We developed a suite of tools that showed Big Machine in the Sky how simplifying relationships between users would work and designed and developed a teaser website for the application.
After the initial iOS development was completed, we oversaw a team of over twenty-five beta testers and deployed over twenty builds while ironing out bugs, gathering feedback, and improving user experience.
Within the first week we there were over 6,000 downloads and OU1 was featured in "New and Noteworthy" on the App Store home page, shared by the App Store account on Facebook, and reviewed favorably on Lifehacker.com.