SideReel

Culture Club

Atomic first met this San Francisco firm through our mutual involvement in Agile-UX community, a group of software professionals interested in integrating the best practices of user-centered design with agile methodologies. Similar philosophies of design and development made this engagement a natural fit from the beginning.

Long-Distance Relationship

SideReelers Zach Larson and Peter “Pantera” Arzinthar came to Grand Rapids for an initial discovery session (see our set on flickr) and created lo-fi wireframes and other artifacts to guide development. These artifacts led to a more accurate and useful project roadmap to guide the project team, made up of Peter (new to mobile) and two atoms, Justin DeWind and Shawn Anderson. To facilitate knowledge-share among members of the team, Justin and Shawn spent a week in California to work within SideReel’s environment. Peter then spent a week in Grand Rapids. For the rest of development, Atomic and SideReel had frequent afternoon pairing sessions (using Mac OS X “Screen Sharing”) and daily standup meetings. Incorporating the customer into our development team allowed for mentorship and a clean handoff after the initial release.

The App

SideReel was able to leverage Atomic’s mobile expertise to create a feature-rich app with a sticky user experience. SideReel gave our team liberty to control the UI, and our developers showed their breadth of skill by incorporating the elegant interactions that iPhone users expect. Our developers put extra time into testing the application by using it as consumers, uncovering bugs that were difficult to test within the iOS framework.

Features

• Track your shows with SideReel’s calendar
• Get customizable push notifications before shows air
• Access your SideReel Tracker to mark which episodes you’ve watched and see which shows are upcoming
• Create a personal show calendar
• Search SideReel’s library of 24,000+ TV shows
• Buy available episodes via iTunes