An App to Privately Share Location and Coordinate with Large Groups

The Challenge

As a new stay-at-home Mom, Findable’s founder was looking for ways to organize groups of friends to meet at the park, cafes and children’s play spaces. GPS location sharing was just taking off, but there was no simple, secure way to invite friends to one, or many destinations.

Key Insights

Findable engaged Flower Press Creative Studio to examine this issue. We conducted a series interviews to determine current habits and potential improvements. Interviewees explained current methods for organizing groups of friends. Email, group texting, and occasional phone calls were used. No interviewees had used public GPS sharing solutions to invite friends to events, and most expressed concerns about privacy. All of these conversations led to this key Product Insight:

Being able to privately share location with a group of friends would greatly improve the efficiency of organizing events and activities, particularly for people with scheduling difficulties (ie. young children).

The Solution

This Product Insight heavily influenced our design direction. We focused on creating a simple invitation format, where a group organizer could add friends, select one or many destinations and set a time range. Within the time range, if friends opted in, their location would be shared with the group and they would have access to group chat. Once the time range expired, the location sharing would cease.