Foursquare is an iPhone (and other mobile) app that essentially dumps mobile GPS, Social Media and game theory in a big giant blender and hits puree. I like GPS. I like Social Media. I like gamesmanship, maybe a little too much. This should be RIGHT UP MY ALLEY. In theory, it is.
You use your phone to “check-in” to different venues where you happen to be, and if you make a habit of it, you also collect badges for any number of achievements, like being out past 3am, becoming a regular, going out for ten nights, etc. You are also pit against other users to compete for the title of “mayor” of these establishments, based on the frequency and total number of your visits. This is all good fun to me. I saw a post the other day where the author was quitting foursquare because of the spirit of the competition. I get that, but I don’t mind it so much. What I can’t abide are the UX issues that suck the joy out of playing along.
I seem to have bad luck / timing with site downtime. Countless times, I have opened up the app to have an error show up when I attempt to check in. I’m not sure what the actual downtime is for them, but whatever it is, it seems to coincide with many of my outings. More annoying than this, however, is when you take the time to enter the information to add a venue to the app and then submit it only to have it fail with aforementioned sporadic downtime…and NOT preserve all the information you had entered in your form. Why?? This seems like a pretty standard safety to preserve a decent user experience, but alas…nope.
Speaking of adding venues, twice when I have tried to check in, I have been unable to find my current location in the list of existing venues. No big deal. Upon adding the venue, I click “Check-in” only to be checked in NOT where I am, but rather in a location that happens to have the same name, but is miles and miles away. The first was 50 miles away, then the second something like 70+ miles away. I mean, you know where my phone is, WHY would you do that? Why is there no confirmation screen when you add a venue that includes the address, so you can either confirm or say “ACTUALLY, NO…I AM NOT, IN FACT, IN SANTA ROSA. THAT IS A COUPLE HOURS DRIVE FROM HERE.”
Added bonus: NO WAY TO CORRECT THIS ON THE WEBSITE. What? How can that be? Yeah, I can’t believe it either. Are they worried about someone gaming the game? Well, then it seems kinda stupid that they would allow check-ins from hours away then, doesn’t it?
Also, noted for lameness is the part where if you actually go to the website and click to “browse the content” in another geographical area, that actually changes where your account is based. GREAT. You *should* have the ability to change where your account is based, but you should also have CLEAR VERBIAGE on your controls to let you know that *that* is what you are doing. Come on, guys. Super frustrating. If you are not clear with simple stuff like this, a user’s tolerance is already going to be worn down by the time they deal with the bigger UX issues.
As mentioned previously, Foursquare is about as close to a spouse lojack as you can get. It is helpful to know where @aaronh is gallivanting around town, but the UX issues with the app are making it hard to love, or even like. It wouldn’t bug me so much if I didn’t think there was a nugget of something really fun buried in there. Fixable, which makes it all the more frustrating.
Hey hey – thanks for taking foursquare for a test drive and sorry if some of the UX is a little wonky right now. Truth is, even though we launched way back in March, we’ve been hustling up to keep up with the site / growth / bugs ever since and really haven’t had a chance to revisit the original UX / product vision in a looonng time.
Good news is that we raised some funding, got two more engineers fixing our scaling woes and a few friends helping with UX and design issues. We’re hoping a lot oft the wonkyness goes away in the next month or so.
Anyway, to your Big 4 issues:
#1. Saving state info in the app (e.g. saving address info or checkin info on crash)… app wasn’t initially designed with this, but we’ll be revisiting and re-adding. (personally it drives me nuts when I’m on a venue page, leave the app and the app can’t remember what venue page I was on)
#2. Venue matching. The whole venue matching system is a little wonky, and we’re in the process of re-thinking this too. The big problem is that we do a real lousy job matching chain / multiple locations under the same name. The stuff we’re working on now will fix this soon. (sidenote: we should do more GPS matching – the scenario you describe of places being 40m away is a perfect example)
#3. Correcting bad checkins. We provide a way to *delete* bad checkins (http://foursquare.com/history) but not a way to *edit* them. When we launch the new venue matching system, this will surely be a part of it.
#4. The website in general :) Browsing content, adding tips, etc etc… all super wonky. Due to scaling issues and fundraising, etc we’ve just put this off far too long. The good news is that we’re revisiting all this now and again, hope to have a lot of it fixed in the next web revision.
Whew… this is a long post :) Anyway, thanks again for the feedback and I hope you’ll give us another chance once we get everything figured out! (We have a really great masterplan for what we foursquare to be when it grows up, and we’re really looking forward to getting past this hump!)
- @dens
co-founder, foursquare
Hey Dennis! I take it as a really good sign that you are clearly monitoring the chatter out there. Having been on the other side of this kind of post innumerable times, I know it isn’t always easy or fun. UX for all kinds of stuff is our dinner table conversation at our house, so I appreciate you listening. Usually, we grumble to ourselves. heh.
I haven’t given up yet. :) Like I said, I think there is a nugget in there that just needs a little better access. Funding is good. I’ll be totally keeping an eye out to see what you guys come up with to smooth over the rough edges.
Thanks for stopping by!
E