Project Context
Tally was inspired by the first-hand hassle my two friends and I underwent anytime we tried to organize events or outings amongst our friend groups.
All three of us lived on the same dorm floor (Next House, 2 East) in college, along with ~15 other floormates. Our whole group enjoyed doing activities together, such as going out to eat, catching a movie, seeing a concert, etc.
However, when we wanted to plan one of these outings, one of us would usually send out an email asking who’s interested, resulting in all of our mailboxes being spammed with responses of "I wanna go!", "What time was everyone thinking?", "Can we go somewhere else?”, “I can only make it after 7.", "How many should I make the reservation for?", "Nevermind. Can’t go anymore.", "Let’s move it to Saturday."
At the end of the discussion, usually little had been decided. Why? Simply because the appropriate tool didn't exist to aggregate availability and venue preferences.
That's why my two friends and I set out to create Tally - to simply getting together.
My Contributions
I created all of visual assets for used in and used to create the Tally app, including initial sketches, wireframes, in-app instruction screens, logos, icons, and app store screenshots.
I also coded all of Tally's frontend code.
I learned how to use technologies and programs like Adobe Illustrator, HTML, CSS, React, Javascript, and jQuery using Lynda.com (now LinkedIn Learning), Codecademy, Udacity, and Youtube videos.
Project Goals
The main focus of Tally was enabling its users to plan outings with friends and stay informed on its details from inception to execution. With Tally, users established and joined groups to easily share outings with a specific set of friends.
Tally’s polling feature allowed hosts to pick activity, date-time, and venue options and then allows their friends to vote to find the most desired setting.
Also in Tally, each outing had its own chat, giving friends a designated place to discuss and plan the outing, which provided users with much-needed structure for communicating about one specific topic - similar to the "channels" feature of Slack.
Furthermore, separate chats mean on one end, users did not get spammed with notifications for an outing they could not attend, and on the other, they did not miss details for an outing they want to attend in a mess of general, unrelated chatter.
Other cool features in Tally were its integrations with:
- Foursquare - allowing users could see important details like as hours, menus, and pictures for venues & restaurants
- Facebook Events - allowing users to organize details around attending large events like performances, concerts, festivals with friends
- International Showtimes (a service similar to Fandango) – providing users with movies and showtime information, for simplified planning
The larger, long term goal for Tally was to help simplify all time-based interactions occurring in the physical world. For example, instead of having to call businesses like salons, doctor’s offices, and mechanics to make or move appointments, consumers would have been able to schedule appointments with all those venues within Tally.
