Urbanspoon for iPhone
A full redesign of Urbanspoon's iPhone app, against a field of newer competitors with cleaner experiences.
Numbers
- 5
- Team sizedesigners, testers, developers
- 8 months
- Build time
Problem
Urbanspoon had defined the category and then been overtaken in it. A wave of competitors had arrived with cleaner, faster experiences, and the original app was being judged against them rather than against its own previous version.
Solution
A full redesign of the phone experience on the then-current iOS technologies, built around photography and the one-tap vote that fed Urbanspoon's data back into itself.
Analysis
Rebuilding a product that already has millions of users is a different job from building one. Every habit in the old app is somebody's muscle memory, and the vote in particular could not move — it is both the feature people came for and the mechanism the entire dataset depends on.
Result
A substantially modernized iPhone experience shipped on current iOS technologies.
Photos
The vote. Urbanspoon's whole dataset came from people doing this, so it had to be one thumb away at all times. 