social network for bookmarking and recommending places

Scout · 2019

Scout is like Spotify for places — it’s a social network for recommending and bookmarking places. I am the co-founder and designer of Scout and worked on it with my co-founder, Alex Haak.

role

As co-founder, I lead end-to-end design, conduct user research, develop go-to market strategies, pitch to investors, and regularly contribute code (React Native, styled-components). I still work on Scout with Alex and ship features on a monthly basis.

problem

Good places are difficult to find

The best places are shared via word-of-mouth from local experts, yet people often visit TripAdvisor or Yelp to find generic things to do.

Places are difficult to manage

Tools like Google Maps don’t scale well. They suffer from information overload, especially when the only way to browse bookmarks is via the map.

Recommendations are easily forgotten

Everyone has their own way of sharing recommendations, and often times they're forgotten if it's not in an easily accessible place.

information architecture

Scout can be divided into 2 parts: 1) a social feed that allows you to follow activity from friends, and 2) your own personal library that allows you to manage your bookmarked places. They’re heavily intertwined, and once we built atomic components, we were able to share them across both parts of the app.

home feed

The home feed displays recent activity from friends — places they want to go, have liked, or bookmarked in a custom collection. The core benefit of following friends is that it builds a feedback loop that’s linked to your own personal library. In other words, following people you trust will allow you to discover more places that match your taste.

library

We treated the Library tab like a music library. The above interaction was inspired by how Spotify treats songs. We made each place feel lightweight rather than bloating it with photos and a tall height.

collections

Collections allow users to organize their places into themes — generally by location or category. We built a simple Collections feature that allowed users to add to them whenever they saw a place in the app. In the future, we’re planning on adding “smart collections” which would allow places to be auto-sorted by key metadata (“Coffee shops with outlets in Tokyo” for example).

social profile

The profile is the social equivalent to your library — it’s how others see your bookmarked places. We wanted the experience of exploring other people’s profile to be different from managing your own personal places, so here opted for bigger photos and text to get a better sense of each place.