Eqo · Location-based social, Android · Self-directed, 2024

You can have 900 followers and still eat lunch alone.

Eqo is a gamified, location-based social network that turns the strangers within 5 km of you into a community worth showing up for. Everything it rewards costs you a walk.

Role & scope

Sole product designer, concept through prototype.

Market sizing, research, the reward model, IA, interface, and a clickable build people held in their hands. One person.

Design question

How might we make being somewhere worth more than posting about it,

without asking anyone to put their phone down?

Key insight

People are not short of places to talk.

They are short of a reason to turn up. So the reward had to attach to the going, not to the posting.

Outcome

10+

People who held the prototype, on their own phones, in their own streets

Screens carrying the whole model: feed, map, circles, profile

$1.19b

Serviceable market the concept was sized against, before a screen was drawn

Follower counts anywhere in the product, on purpose

Context

Social media made the world smaller. It made our streets stranger.

A feed can put you in a room with a hundred thousand people and still leave you with nobody to call on a Saturday. The platforms optimised for reach, because reach is what sells. Proximity was never the unit, so the people you could actually walk to are the ones you are least likely to hear from.

Eqo starts from the opposite constraint: a feed bounded by 5 km, where every number you can raise has to be earned by being somewhere. That one rule decides everything else, and it makes most of the conventions of the category unusable.

The fragmented self

Nobody posts the version of themselves that walks to the shop. A highlight reel is exhausting to maintain and it is the only thing the format asks for, so the gap between who people are locally and who they perform globally keeps widening.

The market gap

Location-based social is not an empty category, but the products in it are dating apps or check-in apps. Nothing in the space treats a neighbourhood as a shared board that a group of strangers plays on together.

The third place

The places people used to gather in for no reason are closing, and the replacements are transactional. Young people will happily spend two hours in a Discord server for a game they no longer play. The appetite for a group is intact; the reason to leave the house is not.

The idea

The logo is a speech bubble that unfolds into a key.

It opens as a conversation and resolves into a key, and the line that lands underneath it is “Unlock your World”. That is not a tagline sitting on top of a product, it is the specification underneath one. The city is treated as locked: blocks are locked, places are locked, rooms are locked, and the only thing that opens any of them is being physically there.

Which is also why there is no follower count in the product. A follower is a number you can raise without leaving the house, and any screen that showed one would be quietly telling users that the rule was negotiable.

The Eqo splash screen: a speech bubble mark over a starfield

The same mark unfolded into a key, above the line Unlock your World

Two frames of the launch animation. The bubble unfolds, the shape becomes a key, and the promise arrives on the second beat. The key comes back as the pin type on the map.

Four promises, one per swipe

Onboarding usually explains an interface. These four slides explain the deal, and each one is answered by exactly one of the four screens that follow. The reward model behind them was built against Octalysis, which was most useful for what it ruled out: the drives Eqo refuses are the punishing ones, because a streak you get penalised for breaking turns going outside into an obligation.

Onboarding: discover the buzz and excitement unfolding right around you

01Discover

What is happening within walking distance, including the parts your own circle would never post.

Onboarding: take on daily and weekly challenges and rise up the leaderboard

02Compete

A leaderboard small enough that finishing first is actually available to you.

Onboarding: create your identity through physical experiences and shared recommendations

03Become

An identity built out of places you have been, not an audience you have gathered.

Onboarding: connect through conversations and shape communities of shared interests

04Belong

Rooms that turn into groups, with the people you already know kept one tap away.

Designs

Four screens where showing up is the only currency.

One screen per promise. The feed says who is near, the map says what is still locked, the circles say what is happening, and the profile keeps the score. Every number on all four of them is one you have to walk somewhere to move.

The Eqo feed, with a rank podium above local posts

Answers “Discover”

01A feed that opens with a leaderboard

The first thing above the posts is a podium: your rank inside the 5 km and the two people ahead of you. Putting the standing before the content is the argument in one screen. You are not here to scroll, you are here to move up, and the only way up is out.

Every post carries a distance where a timestamp would be. “1.2 km away” is the fact that decides whether you act on it.
The reaction row is Heart, Reply and Wanna Go. Only the third costs you a walk, and only the third moves your rank.
Local is the default tab and Circles is second, so the product opens on strangers nearby rather than on people you already follow.

The Eqo map, with captured neighbourhoods filled in colour

Answers “Compete”

02A map that treats the city as locked

Neighbourhoods fill with colour as they are captured, and a block can only be claimed by standing on it. It is the mechanic that keeps the product physically honest: there is no way to farm the map from a sofa, and the keys scattered across it are the same shape as the logo.

Territory is drawn as fill rather than as pins, so the state of the game is legible before you read a single label.
The pins are keys, trophies and places. There is no pin for a person other than your own.
Precision stops at the block. Close enough to arrange to meet at, never close enough to follow someone home.

The Around Me card: 53 who you’d love to know, 91 who’d turn into friends, and the ones who might surprise you

The three counters in the corner of the map are three coloured numbers until you open them, and then they are sentences. It is the one place in the product where the population around you is described rather than counted, and it is the difference between a statistic and an invitation.

Territory

The territory layer on its own. Yellow is claimed, and at the start of a game almost nothing is. That is the honest picture of what a 5 km product looks like on its first day in a neighbourhood.

The Eqo circles screen, with nearby events above public rooms

Answers “Belong”

03Rooms you could walk to

Circles are public rooms named after the subject rather than the host. Random, Gaming, Ideas, Gym, Mental Health, Nutrition, Finances, Dating Space, Books, Movies, Travel. Joining one asks nothing of you except that you are inside the radius, which is what makes it possible to arrive with no profile and no reputation.

Every room carries a one-line description written in the voice of the room, not the platform. Gym is “Sumo is not counted.” Travel is “Be travelers not tourists.”
No room has an owner in the interface. No host avatar, no member count, nothing to accumulate inside.
A direct message is a request before it is a thread. Someone wants to talk, and you decide.

Inside a room: the header reads three people active in your vicinity

Inside a room the header says “3 people active in your vicinity”. Proximity is stated where the conversation is happening rather than buried in a settings screen, so the thing that makes this room different from a group chat is never more than one glance away.

Events

Events by people around you runs above the rooms, because an event is the version of a room you can physically attend. A cleaning drive and a Rahagiri sit in the same row as a Valorant session, which is what a real neighbourhood's Saturday actually looks like.

Answers “Become”

04A profile measured in places

The three numbers under the avatar are Captured Locations, Taglists and Popularity. Two of them can only be raised by going somewhere, and the third is a read on how the neighbourhood responds to you.

The four cards below report the week: steps, responsibility, goals completed, weekly rank. The profile is a scoreboard, not a shopfront.
The grid underneath is places, not portraits. A profile here is the map of where somebody has actually been.
Taglists are collections of places a person stands behind, and they are how one user's Saturday becomes another user's route.

The day it has to work

Strategy is abstract. So here is a Saturday.

Aanya is 22 and four months into a city where she knows two people, both from work. She has 900 followers and no plans. This is the day the four screens have to earn, told in the order the product would actually be opened.