Bad Dinosaur - Edinburgh

Caroline E.

I love working with Bad Dinosaur. They bring an insightful, experienced team with a real understanding of how to create the ideal customer journey combined with great UX and simple, powerful design. Their ability to translate and speak in meaningful language for non-tech founders is exemplary. This, along with their evident enthusiasm and desire to create something truly outstanding for their clients has made them the ideal partner for Featherbed Tales. I have enjoyed every minute of our time working together, through the ups and downs and challenges of software development, always believing that we will find solutions through their excellent co-design process and collaborative mindset. They are a great asset to us and can justifiably claim considerable credit for the unique platform we have built together.

Paul

I've been working with Bad Dinosaur for just over a year and I can highly recommend their services!

My project is a start-up app providing budgeting tools for property buyers and investors. I spent over 12 months developing (what turned out to be) a concept website myself but this endeavour soon stretched my programming and algorithmic skills beyond their limits! I shelved the whole thing for about six months but thankfully decided to pick it up again, this time accepting that I needed specialist support. Enter Bad Dinosaur!

I talked with a number of developers before opting for Bad Dinosaur. Knowing that some of the logic and algorithms were always going to be challenging I knew I needed a developer to convince me of their credentials in this area. None of the other companies came even close, compared to how reassured I felt after my first sit-down with Bad Dinosaur. The team were very quick to understand the concept and buy into the project. I was immediately impressed and have not had cause to feel otherwise in the meantime.

Bad Dinosaur take a very pragmatic and modular approach to projects. I was involved in every step of the planning process, including capturing deliverables as "user stories" to keep things focussed on function. The UI/UX designs were delivered to a high standard very early on, allowing us to prioritise the complicated maths. On this point I cannot praise Kyle and the team enough. They made short work of some very difficult coding logic and have always been open and receptive to making changes.

We've just completed a third phase (or "Sprint") to arrive at a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) ready for users to try out. Bad Dinosaur were on hand to assist in setting up the live production environment, which was also very helpful for someone with little experience in this area.

I continue to choose Bad Dinosaur as my project grows. Part of the original design spec was to ensure that progression to native apps was possible later on, and I look forward to taking those next steps with the team. I've been able to discuss pretty much any idea for the future of my app with Bad Dinosaur and have found them extremely insightful, Kyle especially. I find this personable approach reassuring at times when I lack direction myself, often feeling a little daunted as a start-up!

In terms of costs, I'm a small start-up and I'm very satisfied with Bad Dinosaur charges. Based on my initial search for developers, I found Bad Dinosaur to be competitive (for my particular needs). Everything was agreed upfront with transparency, and was then delivered to the quoted price with no surprises. I would certainly consider Bad Dinosaur good value for money with a very clear and fair pricing structure.

Overall, from intuitive interface design, through to managing complex logic sequences and offering general business tips, I am extremely glad to have found Bad Dinosaur and cannot recommend them highly enough!

Stepping S. A.

Bad Dino have been really good with us in developing our concept through to reality. The team work with a long term vision which allows us to build and add to the app as the business grows.

Hilary M.

We were two absolute novices when it came to building an app over a year ago. We found Bad Dinosaur and instantly fell in love with the name! Once we had used their services and met the team, it was not long before we fell in love with the company too.

Nothing is too much trouble. There has always been someone on hand to explain the more technical things and more importantly, they have a very design-led approach which was extremely important to us as we were designing an app that needed to be cheerful and happy as well as functional.

Today we have the trundl app and we are very proud of what Bad Dinosaur as our developers have helped us achieve for our members.

Mark D.

Bad Dinosaur’s main strengths are that they worked quickly and that there were regular meetings and solid mechanisms to keep track of progress.

Their main weaknesses, on my project, were a lack of UX/UI design skills and that their use of Microsoft tech would make it hard to find developers to build on the work they did.

They basic architecture of the project isn’t suitable for building on anyway. So I’m now starting from scratch and doing things properly. I’m working with a professional UX/UI designer and what a difference! It’s great to be working with someone whose commitment to users matches my own. With Bad Dinosaur, even getting sound choices of font, colour, spacing etc was an uphill struggle. I had to supply images myself (the designer’s images weren’t suitable) and, months later, I had to pay to change the design choices to ones I could live with.

Bad Dinosaur are probably a good fit for a well-financed company who need a workable product quickly. But they’re not such a good fit for a startup with limited resources. They promised much more in initial conversations than they were able to deliver for the money I had to spend. And they kept trying to sell me a hosting package that was basically Azure hosting with a big markup. They weren’t prioritising my needs.

I chose to work with Bad Dinosaur because they’d been recommended. But I now regret that choice.

Colin W.

Absolutely fabulous agency, and now working with them for my 3rd start-up business. Great team and above all else they are a pleasure to work with. Thoroughly recommend them.

Michelle S.

What a great team to work with. They didn't build what we asked for - they built something better. Through challenge and collaboration they helped us to develop our thinking - resulting in a much better system than we anticipated. And all delivered on time and within budget. The team are friendly, professional and fun. We are looking forward to phase two already.

Alasdair C.

Excellent company I would recommend over and over again. If you have a tech idea in your head and want to bring it to life then Bad Dinosaur are the guys to make it happen. I spent nearly a year searching for developers before I found Bad Dinosaur. Don’t make the same mistake I did.