Context
Twenty was spontaneous plans with people already nearby in your network. They’d raised roughly $40M from Accel, Maveron, Sound Ventures and Roc Nation, with Live Nation and Endeavor among the backers. The idea was right and the product fought it: geofencing nobody understood, onboarding that lost people before the point landed, and a meetup flow that added steps exactly where speed was the whole premise.
I led mobile design on a team of about ten, working with the CEO and the Product Owner, 2018 to 2020.
Contribution
I ran the research before the redesign, not after. Campus sessions and usability tests with current and lapsed users. One finding beat everything else: people needed to start a plan in seconds, and every screen between wanting to and inviting someone lost a chunk of them. So instead of fixing the existing flow I built a feature around the finding. “Down for Something?” is one tap to tell nearby friends you’re free. No event, no time, no place up front. A plan with no details is harder to explain in onboarding, and we went through several rounds of copy to introduce it.
I rewrote the geofencing language from the system’s point of view to the user’s, and overhauled onboarding and the meetup flow against the same finding.
Outcome
“Down for Something?” hit over 50% weekly retention on college campuses.
