Thrillist Maps

Lead Designer
User Research

Lifestyle media brand, Thrillist, has a reputation for being the best in food, drink, and travel reccomendation. Thrillist editors do the leg work for their readers and churn out dependable list-style collections of the best to eat, drink, and do in any given city. Though, at the end of a "listicle" readers had been left to their own devices on next steps, until now.

I designed a local reccomendation product which introduced utility to what had been written-only, unactionable pieces of content. The new discovery experience maps every venue from a curated list, allowing readers to easily plan their next bar or restaurant crawl. Deeper in the discovery flow, hungry Thrillist users can get directions one spot to the next, confirm open hours, or even book a table all from Thrillist.com.

Research and Prototyping

My team and I began by with competitive research, identifying competitor products in the space and ideating on features that would be useful to the Thrillist audience.

I then lead a series of user interviews with members of our target audience to identify common behavior patterns when searching for bars and restaurants. These were followed by quick whiteboarding sessions with the team and followed up with more interviews using a lightweight prototype.

The feedback that we heard most consistantly while refining our prototype was that if Thrillist included a spot in one of their round-ups then the audience knew it was going to be good. With that feedback in mind my team and I deemphasized instances of wordy editorialization, and instead used that screen real estate to feature photography and opportunities for readers to take action.

An added bonus: By treating Thrillist venues as discrete collections of their own information (rather than as a static paragraph in a long-form write up) it's easy for Thrillist to link users to all the collections where that spot has been mentioned, bolstering user confidence in their choice 😉