Foursquare knows that more and more people are visiting their location pages on the web. Back in October of last year, Foursquare launched a huge redesign of foursquare.com, and a big change to the way the site works: Non-members were allowed to use Foursquare’s “explore” feature.
By opening up Foursquare’s data trove to everyone, they made a pretty big statement: We’re a big name in the location search game, and we want to challenge the likes of Yelp, Google Places, and Urbanspoon.
Now, Foursquare is continuing to revamp itself with a new redesign of location pages on the site. They’re more photo-rich, informative, and indicative of a company who is seeing increased traffic to said pages.
Here’s the current (old) pages design:
And here’s the new design for location pages on Foursquare.com:
What you’ll notice immediately is that photos have been given a much more prominent placement on the page. Also, the map has been moved from directly under the location name to the right-hand corner. In the new design, all of the pertinent information is front and center – the address, hours, rating, phone number, price, etc.
Plus, all of the “similar” suggestions on the right-hand side have been given photos and ratings.
Foursquare Web Engineering head Mike Singleton told The Next Web that Explore usage has double in the past two months. He also said that there are now some 50 million unique visitors to the site every month. Plenty of those are coming from non-members, who just happen to find Foursquare as a service to look up location information.
And that’s exactly what Foursquare wants.
The new design has yet to hit the web for all users, and we’re expecting an announcement from Foursquare in the near future. Foursquare knows that its future is in recommendations and detailed, competitive listings for all web users – not just check-ins and badges for members. This is what the company has been moving toward for the past year (remember that massive app update earlier this month?) and this is simply another step in that evolution.
