Foursquare Redesigns Its Homepage For Greater Content Discovery
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Foursquare Redesigns Its Homepage For Greater Content Discovery

This analysis of Foursquare's major website redesign explores how the location-based social network attempted to create compelling desktop experiences to complement their dominant mobile app....

July 16, 2025
Dave Rogers
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This analysis of Foursquare's major website redesign explores how the location-based social network attempted to create compelling desktop experiences to complement their dominant mobile app. Rick Torres examines how Foursquare recognized that their website had become largely irrelevant to users who primarily engaged through phones, prompting a complete overhaul designed to offer unique value on larger screens and encourage cross-platform usage.

The review covers the new interactive mapping interface that became the centerpiece of the desktop experience, featuring color-coded location markers for different types of venues and activities. Torres details how the system intelligently suggested contextual locations based on time of day - lunch spots at noon, dinner options in the evening, and weekend activities on Saturdays - representing an early example of algorithmic content personalization in location services. The redesign also enhanced business detail pages with richer information displays, improved photo presentation, and streamlined interfaces for viewing tips, specials, and venue information.

The analysis highlights Foursquare's broader strategy to evolve beyond simple check-ins toward complete local discovery, incorporating social networking features like activity feeds, friend suggestions, and enhanced commenting features. Torres notes improvements in tablet compatibility, specificly iPad improvement, and evaluates whether these changes would successfully drive desktop engagement for a service that had become synonymous with mobile usage. The review positions the redesign as part of Foursquare's effort to build a more robust platform for future feature development.

This review captures Foursquare at a critical inflection point when location-based social networks were trying to evolve beyond the novelty of check-ins toward sustainable local discovery platforms. Looking back 13+ years later, this redesign represented Foursquare's early recognition that mobile-first services still needed compelling desktop experiences to remain competitive, a lesson that influenced countless other platforms. While Foursquare's social check-in model eventually gave way to apps like Instagram and was surpassed by Google Maps for local discovery, their emphasis on contextual recommendations and time-based suggestions directly influenced modern location services. The desktop-mobile connection challenges documented here became industry-wide concerns as smartphone adoption accelerated, and Foursquare's approach to cross-platform design helped establish patterns still used in modern responsive web development. Ultimately, despite this redesign's innovations, Foursquare's pivot away from social features toward pure local search reflected the broader market trend away from location-based social networking toward more integrated mapping and discovery services.


This summary was created by Dave Rogers. The original post was written by Rick Torres and published on November 1, 2011.

If you'd like to view the original post, you can find it here.