BUTLINS
Making family holidays ‘appier’

With its multi-platform Butlins Postcards! app, Grain Creative has designed and developed a practical tool for users of iPhone, iPad, Android or Facebook to send e-postcards worldwide to their friends and family while on holiday. The family-friendly look-and-feel of the app makes it fun to use, with subtle branding to help promote Butlins’ holiday resorts.

BRIEF
Butlins briefed Grain to develop an app to send virtual postcards by email and Facebook. An important feature of the app is to ‘send lots’ to a list of recipients, with the option to tailor the message for each person. With busy mothers as its target audience, this new app provides the digital alternative to traditional postcards, saving users both time and money.

APPROACH
Grain’s objective was for Butlins to bring to market the easiest, most appealing epostcard app in terms of user experience. Every element of the interface feels hand-drawn – from the app icon to menu buttons – to give users a sense of physical familiarity often lacking from the digital experience. We decided early on to lock the app in the most commonly-used orientations: portrait for iPhone and Android, and landscape for iPad.

The sent postcard format is single-sided for optimal viewing in an email or on Facebook. On mobile devices, a clever layout allows all elements of the postcard to be seen at once. Butlins’ lighthearted tone of voice is felt throughout the app, from the stamp visuals to naming one command ‘Send to all: easy peasy lemon squeezy’.

RESULT
The iPhone and Android versions of Butlins Postcards! launched in August 2011, successfully capturing the cheerfulness of the Butlins brand while moving the postcard into the digital age. The app has attracted publicity in both traditional and online media, and the iPhone version is awarded 5 stars in the App Store. The Facebook and iPad versions were released in December 2011.

FEEDBACK
“With the Postcards! app, families can get the most out of their holiday wherever they are in the world. It’s free, easy to use and takes the hassle out of letting everyone back home know what a wonderful time they’re having!”
Jae Hopkins, Director of Communications, Butlins