Foursquare App
UX & Product Strategy | Research | Visual Design
September 2022 – January 2023
Project Overview
Foursquare City Guide (now known as just the Foursquare app) was once a very popular check-in and discovery app around the 2010s. But over the years, due to a slew of competitors arising and a strategic move to pivot the company into an enterprise business, the app saw diminishing investment until it was put on KTLO indefinitely. Its UI became quickly and noticeably outdated and the experience ever so complicated. It consistently bled users, many of whom were die-hard loyal fans of the app and only wished that the company wouldn’t give up on it.
And their cries for help were heard. Through strict data privacy policies and the critical nature of first party location data to Foursquare’s enterprise products, they strategically decided to refocus on the City Guide app in the second half of 2022.
Challenge
While the company was sure that they wanted to modernize the Foursquare app, they hadn’t a clue on what that should look like. The Foursquare app, because of its beloved history and legacy, was one of the most controversial topics in the company. Everyone had differing opinions of what it should and shouldn’t be.
With a small team of one product manager, two designers (myself and my colleague, Anyi), and a handful of engineers, there was a lot of pressure on us to align the company on a single vision and sell it through.
Thus, in Q4 of 2022, my co-designer and I worked tirelessly with our PM to define and validate a vision, identify our users, visualize the future of the app, and present this to the executive team.
Solution
Through several rounds of user research, competitive analysis, and stakeholder alignment meetings, we established that our vision was to be a social discovery app. More precisely, it would be the best discovery app for finding places to go from your friends and those you trust.
To validate this vision, I delivered upon:
A concept validation survey with 300+ participants to assess the need and the market opportunity
A user persona research study with a 350+ participant survey and 5 one-on-one interviews which resulted in six user persona creations
Storyboards that described two separate user journeys
Three visual design/branding explorations, accompanied by a sentiment analysis survey to guide the visual direction of the app
Six concept mocks that visualized the app layout and potential features that spoke to our vision
A presentation to showcase the vision, concepts, and visual direction that was shared with the executive team to support the discussion for the consumer app strategy in 2023
Process
Establishing the Vision
Actually, coming up with the vision for a social discovery app itself wasn’t all that difficult. First of all, it aligned really well with the legacy of the Foursquare app, which was popular back in the day because you could see where your friends were and where their favorite places to go were. Additionally, we noticed that popular social apps like Instagram and TikTok were incorporating places discovery through geotagging, map UIs, and user generated content. On the other hand, traditional discovery apps like Google and Yelp also launched social features, although none of them were majorly successful.
At that point, we hypothesized that a social discovery app would make a good product market fit, and that users would want this type of thing. We then listed out all of the other sub-hypotheses that we thought would need validation as well, in order to grow confidence in this vision.
Some of the hypotheses that we were looking to test
Validating the Vision
Before staking the entire future of Foursquare’s consumer apps on this concept, we thought it’d be smart to validate our hypotheses first. So we ran a 300+ person survey with the goal of measuring the opportunity around social discovery, and providing justification for whether or not Foursquare should invest into this vision.
We tested with people between the ages of 16-40, based in metropolitan areas in the US, with screening questions to ensure that they were the type of people who liked to go out, travel, etc.
From our survey, we were able to extract the following key insights:
Users trust and prefer to discover places through their friends over all other sources (e.g. review apps, social media, etc.).
Users are most frustrated with the action of writing down and saving places when their friends give them recommendations.
Younger users struggled more and had a bigger interest in exploring places from their friends than older (30+) users did.
Example of one of the questions of our survey and how we analyzed the results
This was enough to tell us that there was interest in places discovery through social networks and that there was an opportunity to make this process easier and more enjoyable for people.
Identifying & Defining the User (Personas)
It was also clear, however, that not everybody would be interested in this type of app. So it was crucial that we identify who our target users were and characterize their needs, goals, pains, behaviors, and personalities with user personas.
Similarly to our validation study, my co-designer and I started by listing out the hypotheses about the users that we needed to test. We wanted to understand things like people’s current behaviors when they’re looking for a place (e.g. a restaurant or bar) to go to, their decision making process, and their motivations.
For our research method, we decided to start with a survey so that we could first create “buckets” of characteristics and identify themes amongst a large group of participants. This would help us separate the responses into criteria for our personas. Then, we’d conduct interviews with a person in each persona group to get a deeper understanding into who they were.
The user personas that we created for the FSQ App
Telling a Story
Alas, we had a vision and our target users. We could’ve just thrown it all into a document, presented it to a bunch of people, and then been done with it. But to really sell the vision through, especially for such a contentious topic, we knew we needed to tell a good story. So we turned to the valuable UX artifact: storyboards.
We created two storyboards. The first was for Mia, your typical working gal living in NYC, who wants to get dinner after a long day on the job. This story was meant to characterize the everyday use case of a discovery app, where a user isn’t planning anything special but just wants to try something new.
Mia’s storyboard
The second story tells the tale of a recent graduate named James, who’s planning a trip with his friends to go to Tokyo. This story painted the picture for how the Foursquare app could be used to explore an unfamiliar city just as well as your hometown.
James’ storyboard
Ideation
To kick off the final part of the project — putting some visuals to our words — I led several brainstorming sessions with my co-designer and PM. The goal of these sessions was to align on the problems that we’re prioritizing, come up with any and every crazy idea we possibly could, and then re-align on the requirements (i.e. the ideas that we think are good enough to put in the designs).
Sample of the “How Might We” workshop that we conducted with myself, my co-designer, and the product manager
Through these workshops, we’d agree that the app concept will have four major screens. The first was the Home page which flaunted a map-first user experience. The second was a visual content-rich Explore page. The next was the profile page. And finally, an experience where users could create their own content and recommendations.
I’ll describe each page later in more detail.
Choosing a Visual Direction
Now before jumping straight into the designs, our design director requested that we put some thought into the visual direction of the app as well.
So we put together three explorations to articulate this. While each one had a different theme and evoked different emotions, all of them used the City Guide branding in a more modernized way.
The different mood boards that we created to articulate options for the visual direction of the app
To meet a tight deadline, we arbitrarily went with the second option. However, later we’d run a sentiment analysis survey with users to understand which options they preferred and what emotions they associated with them. This work would also need to be communicated to the marketing team to ensure that we’re aligned on the brand.
Final Concepts
And finally, we got to the actual product screens. It’s important to note here that the goal of this project was not to come out with a fully flushed design, really well thought out UX, crisp interactions, or accounted for edge cases. It was simply to inspire people to start thinking about what this app could be; what it could look like; what features could exist. In no way, shape, or form did we claim that this would be exactly how the app looked and behaved.
Discovery & Exploration
The first key theme of our discovery app had to be… well, discovery. Users had the ability to explore venues in two different ways. On the home page, users were presented with a map UI that showed general points of interest, and their friends’ recommended places. This page was useful for active searches (i.e. if users were looking to go somewhere right in this instance, or if they were planning for something in the future). Features included search and filtering by your friends’ recommendations, a specific account’s favorite places, venue type, Foursquare recommended venues, etc.
Users could also browse through venues via the Explore page. This page showed a more content-rich UI, focusing on photos and videos to communicate a venue’s appeal. Its use case was for casual discovery, when users didn’t have any immediate plans. Similarly to the map, users could search, filter, and update the location of the content.
Designs for the Home screen (on the left) and the Explore page (on the right)
Trusted Recommendations
Now the real star of the show and our differentiator is the social aspect. This is scattered through all of the pages on the app. Users are able to easily find and view their friends’ favorite places, along with their tips and photos. On the profile page, users could also see lists that their friends have created.
Designs for a venue page that’s been recommended by friends (left) and your friend’s profile (right)
Saving & Sharing Your Favorite Places
And finally, the Foursquare app acted as a one-stop shop for users to share and save all of their favorite recommendations. No longer are the days where you have a countless number of pages in your Notes app, or places saved and scattered across four different apps.
Designs for your profile viewed through a map lens (left) and the experience for creating your own recommendations for venues (right)
The Final Presentation & Next Steps
To wrap this all up, I created a final presentation that communicated these concepts to the executive team, who met in January 2023 to discuss strategy for the consumer apps moving forward. This presentation, along with our research and concept screens, were used as a guide for hiring an agency to execute upon the work. I stayed to oversee the execution from a design perspective.
