Designing Zenly: Part II
2018–2020 Era
Hello, I’m Julien, former Head of Design at Zenly. Now cofounding and leading Design at amo.
Zenly came to an end in February 2023. I started writing this article series in September 2022 following the shutdown announcement.
It took me a while to wrap this up as I was quite busy in 2023. This is Part II, taking place between 2018 and 2020. If you missed Part I or don’t know what Zenly is, head this way. Stay tuned for Part III in a few months.
Chapter I — Signatures
At Zenly, we were a bit fanatical about getting things just right. When we were designing features, we were not just adding a little bit of polish here and there — we were obsessing over some details and truly make them signature.
We thought of every feature like it’s its own mini-app living inside Zenly. Each one got the same love and attention as if it were a standalone creation. This way, we made sure that we were never cutting corners or settling for ‘good enough.’ We believe that it’s these extra lengths we go to that really make our features shine.
Cards
During 2018, we wanted to provide a way to create and share an identity in Zenly but also externally — a way that wasn’t relying on a boring QR code basically. It of course had to be done the Zenly way.
The efforts to put all the tech and design together was one of the biggest during Zenly’s lifetime. At some point it involved more than half the team — it felt like it was a company “inside” the company.
Would we do it all over again considering the overall cost? I guess we would, but with better project management and timeframes. We often talked about this moment, and quoting it, when we had to groom and scope a new feature.
What’s undeniable: on the inside, it turned out to be one of the most shared feature outside Zenly and provided a great frictionless way to add friends in Zenly for our users, and participated in brand awareness. On the outside, it actively helped building the perception and reputation of Zenly as a product that cares about details and delight.
Pops
The Zenly’s way to introduce a referral system to the app also benefited from this attention to details. While it wasn’t our shiniest or loudest feature, we still gave it fun interactions — apparently fun enough for passionate users to try to recreate it from scratch.
This time, instead of giving our users something in return, we thought that the actual Pops view experience itself (one friend invited will get you a “Pops” that you can interact with) could be rewarding enough for our users to keep inviting new friends in the app — and possibly brag about it online.
This is exactly what happened in Russia back in 2018 when St Petersburg teens that were throwing parties started using Zenly. One kid literally invested his own money in ads to become the first in Pops count. Some of us flew there to meet those teens and run some user research.
These organic clusters were basically responsible for some tremendous, organic growth, not just in Russia, but in many of our top markets too. It doesn’t always compound to a great retention though (see Part I about Zenmojis).
Footprints
Footprints is one of these features that really embrace the playful side of Zenly. Users can conquer areas of the map as they roam around and be included in those areas leaderboards. For example, leading in your hometown against other friends will get you the first position as the mayor of this city. Separately, you can also get an overview of how many countries you traveled to and where you spent nights out (in 2022, those became available on the main map, as an overlay).
The magic of Footprints is that it doesn’t require any user input or action at all. It just all happens in the background. It’s all about exploring nearby areas, fun competition with friends, leveraging offline activities. Footprints was an instant success among our users, who reminisce about previously visited locations.
Lina, former Marketing Lead, traveled to Japan in Summer 2022, where she met hardcore Zenly fans. This is how serious Footprints was:
Bump
There were many “signature” features at Zenly. Bump was undoubtedly one of those.
Extremely easy to grasp, fun and functional. Two friends in real life bump their phones (remember bu.mp?!) against each other, to add themselves as friends in the app.
It of course doesn’t end up there. By doing so, you also notify mutual friends in the app that you “bumped into each other”, letting them know that you are hanging out together, triggering highly contextual conversations, and sometimes fomo. Yes it can be annoying, but please, imagine the whole company testing Bump for days internally.
Chapter II— Zenly v4 “Cupcake”
By the end of 2018, early 2019, we decided to give Zenly a redesign (one of many 🥲). We were growing steadily in some parts of the world such as Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Russia, and more. Zenly was supposed to be a global brand and product and the goal was to turn the app into something that would be more appealing to Western markets — such as the US.
We ran many marketing operations, user tests and researches in markets where we didn’t have a lot of users and the outcome was clear: Zenly was perceived as too childish and girly almost all the time.
During a US user test, the following claim summarize it well:
This is an app for my little brother.
This came from a 15yo teenager.
Redesigning a whole product is no easy task and this one would have a fair load of challenges. One of those challenge would obviously be to make the app look mature without sacrificing its DNA, its vibe.
We knew the drill.
The explorations below are interesting because I deliberately use hints of it during the latest redesign in 2022. The defining direction and keywords were: Fun, Bad, Bold. Ironically enough, the final result was definitely Fun but nowhere close to Bad or Bold 😂.
The whole process took a whopping 9 months during which we came up with hundreds of ideas and designs. Most of them being tested in huge batches of user tests. We ran 10 batches of 1000 users in total. We got sent these huge Google Sheets with keywords after every batch and if childish, girly and their synonyms were too overwhelming, we would go back to the drawing board and adjust relentlessly.
Of course, redesign isn’t just about Visual Design. We also took the opportunity to release a few new features along the way, and adjusting older ones.
We partnered with long time and skilled friends from Makata to redesign our whole set of Zenmojis as well as multiple new assets.
Chapter III— One map to rule them all
The biggest Zenly irony always was that it relied on maps that it didn’t own. Apple Maps, Google Maps, Mapbox, and more. It would later on the way to be solved in 2022 (soon more on Part III!) but during all those years, being innovative and thinking out-of-the-box were one of our core strengths. Separately, we kept asking ourselves:
How to make sure the competition is always dragging behind?
Unique core map features helped us make sure Zenly would be unique — at least for a while. Uniqueness, but most of all, velocity.
In 2020, Paul Graham, cofounder of YC said:
Let me tell you, that velocity can be an absolute nightmare at times, but also the best edge you can have against some consumer tech companies, where politics and career paths are the norm rather than the drive for success or the product’s passion.
Even though Zenly came to an end almost a year ago, there is still no real contender out there. Well, until now. Did I tell you about Location by amo? It’s actually better than Zenly (without the fuss) and actually made by the same people who coded and designed it with passion for almost a decade. If you miss Zenly, you should give it a try.
Home, Work, School
Home, Work and Schools — or any other favorite places on a map aren’t something new. In fact, they weren’t even something new in this Zenly’s version but this is when we took it to another level.
What was new though, is that this whole Home, Work, School & Night Places thing, was entirely automatic. No user input, no friction, just magic. Users would automatically discover their places on the map after a certain amount of days and they absolutely loved it.
The whole secret sauce required sweat, tears, blood and voodoo, especially from the backend team led by QP.
Heading, Moving, Sleeping
One of those core features would be real time friend contexts — whether they’re moving, heading somewhere, or just hanging out somewhere cool for the night.
Let’s talk about Heading — picture this, you’ve just clocked out from work and are homeward bound. One of the biggest puzzles we had to solve was how to make a clean, easy-to-use display that tells you the whole story quickly, giving you the scoop on when and where they left, and when they’re expected to arrive. Plus, we wanted to make sure you can get a ping when they reach their destination. All while making sure you can still send those fun Zenmojis or have a quick chat.
We’ve given this feature a bit of a tweak here and there since it first launched, but even from the get-go, it was a pretty efficient and user-friendly way to get real time context from the map.
Another cool map feature would be Sleeping.
Map Lenses
Map Lenses, led by Ahmed, were an attempt of Zenly to see a bit further than “standard and satellite” map layers. An attempt to provide deeper and curated content that would make maps truly your own. We iterated and shipped many lenses along the way and some of them were plain functional (with the Zenly touch of course), while some of them were just entertainment.
The Flight Lens was one of my favorite. I used to love opening Zenly and just check if the plane above me was displayed in real time in the app, which company it was from, where did it take off.
Basically a simpler, funnier Flight Radar, embedded in Zenly.
Chapter IV — That Cool Website®
A few months following Cupcake’s release, we decided to give our official website a bit of a refresh. The goal was pretty simple at the time:
- Brand awareness: show Zenly to the world out there and provide a few, simple use cases.
- PR: it never hurts to get some press once in a while.
- Hiring strategy: a powerful “hook” to attract our future talents.
We were on a tight schedule, we didn’t have every skills required internally but we had a comfortable budget, so we reached out to our good friend Romain Briaux from Hervé Studio to talk about the project.
Together with Michael, the three of us jammed a bit and we came up with this amazing sketch on the wall.
I’m not even sure I could fully describe it today, but the plan was that:
- The signature globe expands/zooms in to immersive 3D scenes.
- Each scene is an actual Zenly use case, with the product being front and center, and a description attached to it.
Once we had a global idea of the final layout, we would spend a lot of focus on the Globe design — which you would land on first when accessing the site, and a first scene. Both of those would serve as a guideline for the remaining scenes and additional pages.
Romain assembled a great team and together, from scratch to release, we made it happen in 3 months, which reflecting back, is completely nuts, considering that for some us, the website project wasn’t our only focus at all.
The reception from our peers, the tech industry, Twitter, was amazing. We won an Awwwards along the way. We didn’t expect a lot of praise from our users or didn’t see any growth bump following the website release, they never were the initial reason we did it — actually, when opening the website link from a mobile phone, you’ll get automatically redirected to iOS or Android app stores.
2020 was, against all odds, a great year in terms of recruiting and our rather corporate website played a huge role attracting talents. Talking about cool websites—take a look at the one we did at amo!
Wrapping up
That’s it for Part II, which covered a very creative era, against all odds. I thought I would wrap up with something not directly related to the product but still cool.
You’ve guessed it by now, we loved to craft experiences. Even just visiting our HQ at the heart of Paris, was an experience by itself. From the elevator to the first thing you would see by getting out of it:
An interactive globe that you control by hands, displaying real time usage of Zenly worldwide. Messages, Zenmojis, downloads, live users, and even Bumps.
