tenfour developed the Heat Tracker iOS app, a skunkworks project hatched by our friends at Draftfcb’s Chicago office. This digital wingman of an app provides a unique visualization of Foursquare social check-ins by venue popularity. With a quick glance, users quickly see what nearby places have more activity by the color of their pins on a map - a tiered heat level representing “cool”,”warming up”,”smoking”, and ultimately “on fire!”
Tapping on a venue’s pin icon launches a display featuring contextual Yelp ratings, travel directions, and the ability to check-in or share venue information via social networks, SMS, or email. If female-to-male check-in ratios are not sufficient, users of the free app can also see a gallery of avatar images as well as first names of others who have publicly checked-in at a particular venue within the previous 3 hours.
Heat Tracker has proved to be catching fire among location-based service fans internationally. With the integration of the Google Maps search API, Foursquare users can now browse check-in trends around the world by city and are no longer constrained to searching only by venue.
Even with a holiday season kick-off and an aggressive Valentine’s Day launch, I was able to iterate on the UX and development strategy including integrating additional API’s, steward Apple’s publishing protocols, and ultimately deliver the app in the iTunes store 12 days ahead of schedule. This success was directly tied to an amazing partnership with Draftfcb; both teams joined forces to collaborate in a dynamic fashion that was as flexible, frank and focused.
Heat Tracker has proved to be catching fire among location-based service fans internationally. With the integration of the Google Maps search API, Foursquare users can now browse check-in trends around the world by city and are no longer constrained to searching only by venue.
Even with a holiday season kick-off and an aggressive Valentine’s Day launch, I was able to iterate on the UX and development strategy including integrating additional API’s, steward Apple’s publishing protocols, and ultimately deliver the app in the iTunes store 12 days ahead of schedule. This success was directly tied to an amazing partnership with Draftfcb; both teams joined forces to collaborate in a dynamic fashion that was as flexible, frank and focused.
