Make Tails better, and get the job

Today before the month

An earlier Family led with a month chart, so the first screen held no walks at all. The household checks the dog several times a day, so the page opens on today and its goals. Walks and Minutes against the goal stayed through every round because they answer “did she get enough?” at a glance.

Tried and dropped: A month climb as the hero. Three competing heroes (a timer, a big figure and a chart) on one screen.

A timer instead of a nag

“4 hr 50 min since the last walk” sits where the day’s timeline begins. It tells everyone whether she needs to go out without a notification telling them to. It is the most useful fact on the page for deciding what to do next.

One vertical day, with the walker at the end of the row

Walks and potty breaks share one line, so the day reads top to bottom like a calendar. The walker’s face sits at the end of each row, so their name is not repeated. The dog stays the subject, and the person is the detail.

Tried and dropped: A horizontal day ribbon, which repeated the list under it. Splitting the day by person, which lost the dog. A hydrant icon for pee, which read as a red Christmas tree, so pee became a yellow drop.

Every walk shows what it did for her health

Each walk row carries a Health figure (“Health 5”): that walk’s real contribution to her Health Score, printed beside minutes and miles. The score itself stays on Family and never appears on the Friends feed.

Tried and dropped: A chip for each measure on every walk (too busy). A bare score with no link to the walk (too subtle).

One dock, reused

Start walk and logging a poop live in the same floating dock as the Health tab, so the main action is always in the same place. When you log a poop from the dock, it flies into Today’s Poops, so you can see it landed.

Tried and dropped: Start walk and Invite as two equal buttons. The pair split the eye, and Invite moved into the header.

Goals pin on scroll

Once the Today card scrolls away, its three rails pin under the header in a compact bar. You can read back through the day without losing whether today is on track.

The paw is the progress bar

The group goal fills our own icon. The main pad fills first, then the toes from left to right, by area, so a half-full paw really is half the goal. It replaced a stacked line chart, and it is the same paw that holds a dog’s health on the Health tab.

Tried and dropped: A plain progress bar and a ring. Both tested worse than the old chart: more clutter and less information. The paw then replaced the chart.

Pace in words, not just a number

“2.3 hr behind pace” answers the real question (are we going to make it?) without making anyone do maths on 11.8 of 38.5 with 19 days left.

One colour means the reading you picked

The paw, every ring and every gain share the colour of the selected reading: red for Time. Dogs are told apart by their faces, not by colours, so colour never means two things at once.

Tried and dropped: A colour per dog. It spent the palette on identity, and it clashed with the colours that already mean Minutes, Walks and Distance.

A row of faces that says who still needs to walk

The Today row is both the day’s summary and the chart’s legend. Each ring fills toward that dog’s own goal, and “Not yet” under a face nudges people more kindly than a reminder would. Past 100% the ring laps itself, as Apple’s Fitness rings do, with a cut-out end so the extra lap stays readable.

Tried and dropped: Thin rings (too faint at a glance) and a checkmark badge for a met goal (we used the lapping ring instead).

Invite is always on screen

A shared goal only works with people in it. Invite sits in the faces row and in the bar that pins when you scroll, so it is always in view.

Tried and dropped: A bottom Invite dock, which disappeared into the tab bar.

Design for routes, not photos

Most feed items are walk routes, not photos, so each row leads with a compact route model and a short statement. A feed built around big photos would be mostly empty boxes.

A summary page, like Apple’s Fitness

The old page put a switch under one chart, and people didn’t see that it was tappable. Now a hero sits on top, the measures follow as two-up cards, and tapping a card opens its full chart. Everyone already knows this pattern.

Health Score and Health Age are kept apart

Health Score is this week’s habit, and it moves with every walk. Health Age is the long-term trend. Mixing them would make a good week look like the dog got younger. The score sits in the hero, and tapping it opens the Health Age page.

Colour names a measure. It never grades it.

Minutes is always red, Walks always orange, Stamina blue, Sniffari green, Poops teal, on every screen including the live walk. Because red is just “Minutes”, it can’t also mean “bad”. Figures print in ink, and past days recede to a tint so today stands out.

A measure appears only once it means something

One shared rule decides when each card fills in: a few walks for Walks and Sniffari, a few logged poops for Poops. Before that, a card says what will fill it. A score we can’t compute yet shows a dash, never a zero that reads as a failing grade.

No internal words on screen

Inside the team we say signals, pillars and baselines. On screen it is walks, minutes, sniffing and poops, and comparisons are always to last week.

Ask Tails has a face made from the paw

Each of the paw’s five pads has its own shape and colour, and Ask’s face is one of them. The face follows the topic: ask about walks and it becomes the orange ball. The assistant picks the topic itself rather than matching keywords. In the tab bar it says hello once by rolling through all five, then only blinks now and then: alive, not busy.

Tried and dropped: A face that changed every second (busy). A flat brand-orange circle, which read as a second selected tab.

Answers come with a comparison

“Are we walking Luna enough?” gets a yes or no, then what adult dogs on Tails usually get. A number alone doesn’t help a pet parent decide anything.

The tab answers “is this Pack alive?”

A pile of faces of who walked this week shows a busy group better than any single result. The order is fixed: photo, name, who walked, how many walkers. Names are never cut off.

Tried and dropped: A league table with your rank (one rank can’t sum up several challenges). Raw times like “9:34” on the tab: lots of reading, very little meaning.

Your place in every challenge, in the switch

Each segment names a challenge and your place in it (“1 mile · 2nd”). You can see where you stand everywhere before you choose one. It is a real switch, always visible, even when there’s only one challenge.

Tried and dropped: Challenge rows at the bottom of the page, and a swipe pager. Both hid the other races.

Show the gap as a finish line

The race is drawn as lanes crossing a checkered line. First place sits on the line, and the others sit back by how far they were behind: 12 s, 24 s. You see the gap before you read it, and you see what it takes to move up.

The course is the walk to beat

The 3D route is the course of the walk currently in first place, and the top three race it at their own pace. It makes a weekly time trial feel like a place you could go and walk.

Every walk counts automatically

There is no Chase button and nothing to opt into. A walk you were going to take anyway enters every race you’re in. The deadline is always Sunday, stated in words.

Sniffing adds up. It isn’t a race.

The Sniffari challenge counts the week’s total sniffing time across all walks, so a slow, nosy walk wins. It’s drawn as the week so far, day by day, not as a sprint.

Tried and dropped: Rings, minute dots and timelines of sniff stops. They borrowed track-meet metaphors for something that isn’t a race.

Make the walk itself the adventure

People repeat the same loop. Showing how much of your neighbourhood you’ve explored (“66%”, “+8.1 blocks this walk”) gives a reason to turn down a new street, which is better for the dog’s nose too. Zoom out and the streets you haven’t walked yet are still under fog.

A diorama, judged as stills first

We wanted the tilt-shift look of a model town: pixel art, soft focus at the edges, a fixed chase camera above the dog. The first version was built object by object and fell flat. After that, every look was rendered as stills and compared with our references before any of it was built into the app.

Tried and dropped: A cel-shaded, outlined version. Trees looked good but roofs turned into fine stripes, so we kept pixels.

The light follows the real sun

An evening walk looks like evening: golden hour, then teal night with lit windows, street lamps and a warm glow around the dog. Seasonal palettes (a spring meadow and a fall storybook) are picked and being wired to the calendar.

A smooth route over pixel art

The route is drawn as a clean line, not pixels, and coloured by walking speed. The contrast in style keeps the one thing you need to find readable against a busy world.

Show what the walk feeds, not the score

The card shows the paw’s five measures in their usual colours: minutes and sniffing filling live, Walks +1 at the end. You can watch your walk count without a score jumping around mid-walk.

One card, in every state

Nothing stacks over the world. Tapping a measure turns the card into that measure’s page in place, and logging a pee is one tap. A finished walk opens in the same card, so a live walk and a past walk look the same.

Frame rate is part of the design

The world adjusts its detail to the phone, steps down before the phone gets hot, and treats a look it can’t hold as a bug. A beautiful screen that drains the battery on a 45-minute walk isn’t beautiful.