LivingSocial has always had a very engaged iOS user base. Recently shifts in our business have necessitated changes in the mobile experience.

When I was the UX lead for the mobile team we were still offering only a few deals per day and they were often very segmented by category. Our iOS architecture was built on Apple's table view navigation structure, in the HIG. It worked very well for our early inventory architecture. However, with inventory growing and a desire to support more exploratory seeking we wanted to test a hypothesis of a content first index screen.

There were some obvious challenges to this. The biggest being an information architecture that was quickly growing and needed support for many categories. It was too large to stay in the table view solution we had and our top level navigation was too many to move to a tabbed view. We tested at least three different versions of a content first index screen before a new design won in an A/B test. The winning design used drop down navigation and an easy access to search. I did have some major concerns with this strategy, however. My biggest concern was the lack of discovery for other business verticals that were hidden under the drop down. I was also worried that for first time users who were unaware of our offerings, a feed based listing can be very limiting when trying to provide an overall understanding of your offering.

When iOS7 was announced it was luckily in line with a lot of work I was doing on rearchitecting our desktop experience. This allowed me to push harder for a tabbed navigation in iOS that would allow our users to, at a glance, know what we offer and find their already purchased vouchers. Also tabbed navigation has the added benefit of perceived performance which made it an easy sell to engineers.

On top of all the work that I have been doing on our core applications I have also worked on many different exploratory concepts that exist in prototype form. The value of doing this type of work is testing concepts and features that may make their way into our core application. I have found that the user testing on these prototypes has ultimately been the most valuable work I have done in understanding our business and our users appetite for any changes in our model.