LivingSocial's mobile platform for merchants is imperative to running a promotion and tracking its success. Many of our merchants transact with their customers far away from a computer and our mobile solutions provide them the core tools they need.

When I first took on the redesign of our native iOS application the version we currently were relying on was web-based so that we could port it on both iOS and Android. At this point it is fairly well known that this practice has failed for many tech companies, most notably Facebook, and we felt those same pains.

When we started the project we knew we wanted to offer more than our current experience did. Our original app was only a redemption tool and did not provide any analytics or performance reporting for the promotion. For this process we designed multiple prototypes and tested on a weekly cadence with real merchants. After we had an MVP secured we continued to test other concepts that we were considering building for our merchants.

The two most notable tools we worked on were prototypes around a point of sale system and also an app that would perform scheduling capabilities for some of our service merchants, like salon owners.

What we discovered through this process was that our merchants were much more interested in some of the less obvious features we were testing in our prototype. We had been putting the idea of customer segmentation into the app as well as giving merchants the ability to do some acquisition of customer data. Our testers found these features to be far and away more valuable. The added benefit to this learning was that a lot of those concepts would prove to be valuable to more than just our service merchants. This shifted our thinking about merchant solutions as a whole and in our most recent redesign (currently unreleased) we will be including a lot more features to support these concepts.