Crowds

Two customers with different stakes

The core tension was designing an app that told users when a place was crowded without discouraging people from going. Students needed honest information. Local businesses needed to attract customers, not scare them off. I had to design something that was genuinely useful to both.

Research-first from the start

As a founding designer, I wanted the business strategy and the designs driven by actual users. Students were our primary demographic and easy to reach, so I started there. In the first design round I talked to 30 students and 10 local businesses to understand whether the concept had legs.

Learnings

• 01Simple design with minimal core screens to enable location exploration without cognitive overload
• 02Consider whether separate university apps would be the easiest path to institutional partnerships
• 03Provide clear value to businesses wary of potentially deterring customers
• 04Prioritize visual design since students wanted quick location information without reading descriptions

Personas: student and business owner

User flow: location discovery

Brand designed for university partnerships

I created three style tiles, tested them through user interviews, and iterated from there. The final brand was designed to be flexible enough to potentially incorporate university branding. I also developed secondary colors for each crowding level so users could read density status at a glance.

Style tile 1

Style tile 2

Style tile 3

Style tile 4 — the direction we chose

Map beat list in testing

Wireframe testing made the right structure clear. A map-focused design was most effective for enabling exploration while keeping the interface simple. It connected the location-based concept directly to how people actually thought about finding places.

We settled on four crowding levels, enough variation to be useful without becoming hard to interpret. Since crowding depends on venue capacity, we used subjective rather than quantitative markers.

Wireframe: map view

Wireframe: location detail

Final design built for a fast, honest glance

Two viable design patterns emerged in final design. After discussions with the CEO and CTO, we split-tested versions of location detail pages across Android and iOS. Testing showed users didn't have strong preferences since both met their needs, but we chose the iOS version and applied to both platforms because it offered more flexibility for discovery of new locations.

From there I moved into high fidelity, carrying the crowding color system through every screen so a student could glance at the map or a location card and immediately understand how crowded it was.

Final: map view

Final: location detail

Final: expandable location list

Final: full location detail

Reflection

The map-based design worked. Usability tests were consistently successful and the apps launched to positive reviews. We gathered extensive feedback from location partners and explored different partnership models before ultimately shutting down the app.

Learnings

• 01Develop stronger strategies for bringing in local business partners earlier, since this became the main growth constraint
• 02Build a more flexible color palette to support scaling additional features
• 03Research the connection between app usage and actual location visits more rigorously