Crowds

Crowds was a Philadelphia startup that showed students how busy nearby study spots, bars, and restaurants were. As founding designer I ran it end to end, starting with interviews with 30 students and 10 local businesses. The tension was there from the first conversation: students needed honest information about how crowded a place was, and businesses needed customers, not a label that drove them away. Anything that served one at the expense of the other wasn't going to work.

The decision that resolved it was settling on four crowding levels expressed subjectively rather than as numbers. Crowding is relative to a venue's capacity, so a headcount means nothing without context, and a vaguer signal was both more accurate and less damaging to a business than a hard figure. Wireframe testing pushed the whole app toward a map, which matched how students already thought about finding somewhere to go.

The app launched to good reviews, and 40% more students tried locations they hadn't been to before. We explored several partnership models with local businesses before shutting down. That was always the constraint, and we found it later than we should have.