WhoIs, a Facebook application, allows a community of 10 million+ users to highlight trends by reporting physical location and status. A by-product of this integration with Facebook created an incredibly rich set of data - one that gives an opportunity of integrating real-time check-ins with the ability to follow/friend fellow users physically nearby and additionally those who share similar interests. The team wanted to expand the embedded Facebook app into its own iOS version (integrating all data of course), simultaneously increasing overall engagement.

I started by having a scoping session - collecting everything that was already in the existing WhoIs team's heads. There was also a plethora of other checkin apps to explore and learn from. I determined overall that users loved the Facebook app because of its simplicity, and any changes would need careful consideration.

I started with sketches. And since initial whiteboard drawings are informal, anyone could easy contribute and add to whiteboard sketches and draw new ideas. As these ideas solidified, I refined them creating high fidelity wireframes and then designs. It took a few iterations before there was a direction that we were all happy with. It wasn't perfect, but it was sufficient to be built as an alpha version and then able to immediately gather feedback via user interaction through metrics.

Projects can thrive when I'm working alongside a back-end development team. In this case, I worked with developers in weekly sprints, going from concepts to design to functional prototypes in a matters of weeks (instead of months). We went through multiple iterations using this process before settling on a preferred user flow. I was also able to quickly flag any quality assurance concerns.

Findings of usability testing in the live, albeit alpha, product were incredibly useful by identifying a number of issues in maintaining user engagement. Within 30 days, we had a 40% increase in user interaction. In 90 days, we had an increase of 125% in user engagement. A continual eye on metrics allowed a seemingly never-ending tweaking to continually increase engagement through A/B testing.

After a few iterations we felt that issues that were identified in testing had been solved, and now could focus on small details that make the experience not only polished, but a visual pleasure to use.

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