It's getting used more and more in our app--few recent examples are the "Promote Post" UI if you're a business account and want to promote a post from inside Instagram, the Saved Posts feature, and the comment moderation tools we now provide around comment filtering.
Thank you! Im from Uruguay so my native language is Spanish. I've learned english mainly by playing videogames (I kid you not) as a kid, as Warren Buffett says "We prefer process over outcome" so It was a fun way to do it.
I started learning English with videogames too. I bought an English translation dictionary that was about half my weight to play Zak McKracken, on a 286 my dear avó owned. My tipping point came much later, with a pretty and sweet native English speaking girlfriend.
It is, im sorry if this offends anyone, but it was crucial to give a proper introduction to the mental model thing. Will try something better next time. Sorry for my bad english.
Foursquare always had a better design. Hear me out:
Design is about 2 things: how it looks and how it works. Gowalla always had a prettier coat of paint, pretty interactions. But what mattered more was the design of the game - becoming mayor on Foursquare was easier to grasp and get addicted to than dropping the original Gowalla teddy bears.
Foursquare also beat feet to win the hearts and minds of small business owners - I've lost count of the number of bar and restaurant owners excitedly telling us about how the Foursquare rep came in to talk to them, pointing out the sign on the wall where the "Mayor goes," arguing with regulars over who's the Mayor this week, who cheated to become the Mayor last week, and so on.
We've travelled a lot, and this happens coast to coast in big cities and small.
I've always really dug Gowalla (when I check in, typically only around an event like SXSW, it's what I've used), but when real people are talking about you in real life (an initially slow, but snowballing and very effective advertising model), all over the country--you end up winning.
More than that you get free stuff if you checkin. I think this is the draw more than anything else. And this is the reason why foursquare solves a business need.
Facebook does have a solid design team, but I wonder where all that talent is being directed? Visually, their hires in the past year or so haven't made an impact with facebook.com. At least with Google's new design team, you can see what they're doing.
So, one has to ask, what are these people working on? A facebook phone? Facebook X.0?
I really, really hope Facebook doesn't do that. It makes absolutely no sense for anyone to buy a Facebook tablet, unless they intentionally cripple the capabilities of their apps on other tablet platforms.
If the Facebook's new designers do nothing new at all, but they hold the line against Google-style insane UX-destroying experimentation, they will be incredibly valuable.
Just as a point of clarification, Facebook has an incredible existing product design team, but the last year's new hires/acquisitions have yet to prove if all the new blood adds up to the best, e.g. just because you hire a bunch of amazing individual designers, it doesn't mean they're automatically and amazing team.
That said, I have a lot of faith in their culture that they will become so; team-building is just never a given.
