FoodFlip
A ground-up rethink of local food search for iOS 7 — photography first, chrome stripped out, built and launched in five weeks across 85 countries.
Numbers
- 85
- Countries at launchworldwide beta
- 5 weeks
- Build time
- 3
- Team sizeone designer, two developers
Problem
A year inside local food search had made one thing obvious: almost nothing on the market had absorbed what iOS 7 proposed. Apps were still spending screen on chrome — bars, borders, controls — in a category where the only thing anyone wants to look at is the food.
Solution
A new app built on the opposite assumption. Photography edge to edge, interface elements removed rather than restyled, and search results arriving immediately rather than after a form.
Universal binary from the start, so iPhone and iPad were one product.
Analysis
Five weeks and three people only worked because the thesis was narrow. One idea, let the content have the whole screen, and anything that did not serve it never got built.
That also made the product cheap to be wrong about. We put it into eighty-five countries as a market test and learned more in a fortnight than another quarter of internal debate would have produced.
Result
Shipped to beta in 85 countries as a minimum viable product, iPhone and iPad from one universal binary.
Photos
Search, with the result already filling the screen. The photograph is the interface. 
