Designing a user experience for your social life
By: Ceci Alvarez
Mappen makes it easier for friends to make plans, share their location, and connect. Let’s say you just landed in a city and you want to see if anyone you know is nearby. Maybe you want to broadcast your plans so your friends can join. Or maybe a friend just left a party and you want to make sure they got home safe. All of these social interactions depend on location.
Mapbox gave us the flexibility to build a friend-first map experience. This means that street names and businesses had to take the back seat, and your friends and their emoji status are front and center. -Jared Allgood, CEO Juxta Labs
Mappen’s design team started with Cartogram, prototyping hundreds of different color combinations to land on the right map aesthetic. They then took that inspiration into Studio, our visual design suite.
Studio gave us control over the context and design of every layer and zoom level. Being able to do this as designers rather than engineers was extremely valuable. We could quickly work with an idea, test it live, and then share with our entire customer base.
The map interface and location features are built with our Maps SDKs for iOS and Android. Users can see real-time locations of their friends, message each other directly, and find things to do, all in one app. For search, Mappen is using our Geocoding API to translate coordinates into places and addresses. Users share their favorite POIs, and instead of receiving business-driven content, notifications are more about connecting people to places like, “Hey, you’re near Christa’s favorite coffee shop.”
In the near future, Mappen plans to add directions natively so it’s easier to navigate to a friend’s location without kicking out to other apps. They’re also exploring social heatmaps.
Early on, we realized the map was going to be the main interface to engage our users. Mapbox gave us the tools to craft a unique user experience and bring our brand to life.
Find your friends on Mappen. If you’re creating a social app, use our Maps SDKs for Mobile to add custom maps and rich location features. Reach out to our team with any questions.
Mappen’s friend-first map was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.