Summary
Hallmark Cards, the largest manufacturer of greeting cards in the United States, engaged The Nerdery to help bring a customizable, print-on-demand greeting card app to the iPhone. Together with our user experience team, The Nerdery’s iOS developers brought Hallmark’s vision to the App Store in time for Mother’s Day.
Challenge
With unmatched industry knowledge of the greeting card business, Hallmark saw a market for customizable, print-on-demand greeting cards. Following a recommendation, Hallmark reached out to The Nerdery to help develop a card-creation iPhone app. With a pre-Mother’s Day target launch date that allowed for approximately nine weeks for development, Hallmark looked to The Nerdery to meet their ambitious timeline, provide digital strategy, UX design and development.
Method
To accurately understand and guide the development of Hallmark’s vision, The Nerdery’s UX team met with Hallmark’s stakeholders to develop the informational architecture and interface of the iPhone app. We provided Hallmark with a sitemap of the app, detailed wireframes, digital designs and a clickable prototype. Additionally, we documented current considerations as well as considerations for future developmental phases, making sure the application’s layout and development was designed with later additions in mind.
With the initial launch of the app being exclusive to the iPhone, development focused solely on iOS. To help users find the type of card they want to create and print, we developed a recommendation engine that – after asking the user a few questions – gives the user a curated field of card options appropriate for the occasion. Other features include custom-built animations, hand recognition for signatures and the ability to add photos directly from an iPhone.
Result
Hallmark now has an app that lets users easily find, customize, print and send a card – all through the convenience of a single iPhone application. We met the tight timeline, having the app uploaded and approved by Apple in time for the Mother’s Day deadline. We continue to partner with Hallmark on new phases of the app to bring additional features and expand the platforms available.
