Mizo was(😢) a fun way to discover new places and experiences. Instead of deciding where to go based on text/image reviews or scrolling through "listables" you could find places by browsing friends video recommendations - all on one fun, interactive map. Mizo was a start up I cofounded and worked on as a designer. I was responsible for everything designed related (product, brand, etc) and much more.

During our research, we conducted user interviews to understand how people discover new places and the pain points they face in the decision-making process. Our goal was to understand the factors that influence the decision to try a new place and what goes into the decision-making process.

Information overload: People rely on a variety of different sources to find things to do such as social media (inst, tiktok, etc), publications(infatuation, eater, timeout), and apps (yelp, google maps). However, so many different sources of information, it can be difficult to filter through and find the most relevant and reliable information
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Lack of personalization : Many existing solutions provide surface level recommendations and don't truly understand user's tastes

Hard to remember everything : People are constantly bombarded with content and while they might find something they like it is hard to keep track of these places
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People prefer good content : Experience is lacking when information is purely text based. Good pictures or videos have a big impact on experience

Quality & Trust*** : The biggest pain point by far was not knowing if a place was worth their time or not. Users feared wasting their time, money, and effort on a place that turned out to be disappointing. As a result, the average person tried a new place only 1 in 5 times (although this statistic isn't too significant when segmenting users and types of places). We heard this same sentiment repeatedly: 'I would love to try new places, but I don't want to waste my time.'"

Going out, whether that is to a club or a restaurant is a very social activity. Decisions therefore are made by groups. We identified two personas that typically exist in this dynamic: the tastemaker and the passive follower. The tastemaker is someone who pays attention to trending places and is a source of recommendations in their friend group. They usually know all the popular spots in their city and discover new places through reading publications or following accounts on social media. The passive follower, on the other hand, relies on the tastemaker for recommendations and often goes with the flow.

Our major takeaway from these interviews was the importance of the interaction between the tastemaker and the person asking for recommendations. Currently, this interaction exists mainly through text messages, and the media that tastemakers capture is not easily accessible or is only posted on stories that disappear after a certain amount of time. We recognized an opportunity to improve this dynamic and create a platform that makes it easier for tastemakers to share their experiences and for passive followers to discover new places.

Based on the interviews we began to formulate what we planned to build. Our mission was to provide a fun discovery experience that was not cluttered and gave people places that they actually wanted to go to.

Smaller Networks : To deal with issue of trust we decided to focus on a smaller network of people that users would interact with ie your friends. This was backed up by 100% of interviewees saying they valued word of mouth very highly in going to places. While you would still be able to see content from accounts such as publications, or influencers/foodies, content from your friends would be heavily prioritized. Additionally you would have the ability to filter between account types.
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Map vs Feed : While there is an option to browse content through a feed, we ultimately went with a map as the default way of viewing content. This primarily had to do with context ie. being able to see what is around you -> then viewing content vs the other way around.  

Native Video Editor : From our interviews we discovered the quality of content that people saw of a place had a big impact on their decision to go there. People talked about the engaging content they viewed on Tiktok and Instagram from creators as well as the viewing friends stories of places they went to. While uploading photos/videos would be easier technically, we chose to invest in a native camera and video editor to make the experience of capturing experiences at place fun on Mizo.

While we wanted to build an app that helped facilitate this interaction between the tastemaker persona and the follower we realized to gain traction and have an app that has content, we needed to focus on the tastemaker persona. To do this we focused the first features on making the documenting process easy and fun.

We ran into pretty clear issues as we started testing the app and getting feedback.
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Feed : Maybe it was lazy ideating, but we focused on a TikTok-like feed filled with videos and reactions to places in your city (the only thing missing was The Algorithm)
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Learnings : While having a feed is still important in the context of a 'browsing' use case, the point of Mizo is to bring more utility compared to social media apps. Therefore, when thinking about the 'searching' use case where you're looking for a place, you need more geographical context to view content ie. you need to see what is around you. We pivoted away from the feed as the default content viewing mode and placed the map there instead.
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Top Notch Content: To fill the lack of content when people first downloaded the app, we filled it with videos that we thought were of top quality. We believed that these would be engaging and help show users what type of content we imagined on Mizo.
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Learnings : We learned that these videos fell flat because there was no quality indication since there were not enough users liking posts and users did not trust the people who were posting because profiles had no followers yet. The major takeaway was that people didn't trust posts or accounts without some sort of status. To solve this problem in the near term, we focused on people whom users did trust - their friends.