ZooLog+
Animal records for zoos and keepers.
2026
Eleven pieces of psychology we design with, and where to see them
Deep diveA field guide to the design psychology behind our apps and sites: the published source for each idea, the screen where we used it, and the dark-pattern version of it we will not ship.
Six months in, by the numbers
By the numbersMediant Partners Ltd was incorporated on 11 May 2026. Six months on: 195 repos, 5,795 animal logs in ZooLog, 4,710 commits in the five repos we work in most, and a November repo count that needs an asterisk.
We designed for wet gloves and never tested a glove
Deep diveFive design choices in ZooLog+ for keepers working outdoors, the published research behind each, and the glove test we have not run.
Rewriting ZooLog in Swift and Kotlin in a week
Case studyOn 19 October the ZooLog mobile app was 134,442 lines of Dart. On 26 October it was Swift and Kotlin, opening the old app's database and settings where they lay. What it took, and why we have no better reason than a director's call.
Sign-in without passwords, SMS or an auth vendor
Decision recordOn 16 October we wrote one sign-in standard for every app we run: an emailed code plus Apple, Google and Microsoft, our own revocable sessions, and no passwords, SMS codes or auth vendors. Here is why, and the linking rule that matters most.
Three things ZooLog refuses to do, with the numbers
Decision recordWe built photo recognition and left it switched off. Voice can write a keeper's note but never a drug dose. And there is no keeper leaderboard. Three refusals in a welfare app, and the numbers behind each one.
ZooLog is on Cloudflare from the first commit
Decision recordTwo days in, the keeper app runs on Workers, D1, Queues and R2, with no other backend behind it. That was the easy decision. The hard one is what happens when a keeper logs a feed where the phone has no signal.