Prepping Foursquare Swarm for the next 12B check-ins

Building Swarm 5.0 through experimentation, prototyping, sprints and user research

Last week we unveiled Swarm 5.0 on iOS, and today, we’re celebrating two additional milestones: we’re launching Swarm 5.0 for Android and we’ve just hit 12 billion check-ins.

We’re really proud of the product we’ve built and our accomplishments, particularly on a day like today. We hope you’ll check it out if you haven’t already.

As the product manager on Swarm, my role is to identify the most important problems to solve, and then work with everyone from design to engineering to make great products come to life. Today, I want to peel back the layers a bit and give some insight into *how* we transformed Swarm from the product it was eight months ago into the product it is today, and some of the product goals and decisions behind this redesign. This post will share insights and key learnings from this exciting (and sometimes) challenging process.

Focusing on Lifelogging

In Swarm 5.0, we refocused the product around lifelogging. Yes, lifelogging was always part of Swarm, but it was never central to the user-experience — it was more like a byproduct of the games, social interactions and other elements. (For more background on our shift in perspective, read this post from our co-founder Dennis Crowley about *why* we made this change, and this post from our designer Greg Dougherty about some of the design changes we made to bring this use case front-and-center.)

This entire process began when we conducted a quantitative user research survey with over 1,000 users to help us understand the core motivations for using Swarm, and the features that our community was most passionate about. The results were definitive: Swarm users rely on the app to keep track of all the places they go, and easily look back on those places. It was our job to redesign the product around the core use case of lifelogging, while maintaining the fun elements and personality that delight our users.

The Big Experiment

We knew a critical part of this redesign was finding the best way to elevate the user’s personal check-in history so that it was easily accessible. The key challenge we faced was that a user’s social feed had always been front and center in Swarm. De-emphasizing the friend feed and replacing the home screen with a user’s own check-ins was a radical idea, and would represent a substantial shift in how a user would perceive and interact with the app.

To better understand how users might react to an elevated personal check-ins feed before spending months redesigning Swarm, we ran an experiment to validate this new direction. In just one week, we put together a version of Swarm that made the user’s personal check-in history the first thing they saw, and the social feed secondary, with no other changes made to the app.