SightMark

SightMark is a social media app that helps you find and share the best places in your city. Restaurants, parks, hidden gems, parking, and more. Instead of relying on anonymous reviews or scattered Instagram posts, you see real recommendations from real people you know and trust.

Users drop pins on a map, share photos and tips, and filter by what actually matters to them. Things like wheelchair accessibility, family-friendliness, parking, and vibe. A streaks and badges system makes exploring your city feel like a game, and a year-end recap shows everywhere you've been.

Think Google Maps meets Instagram, but built for discovery and powered by people you trust.

I conducted user interviews with people across a wide range of ages, abilities, and lifestyles to understand how people currently discover and share places in their city. Participants included a wheelchair user who needs accessibility information before she can commit to visiting somewhere new, working parents who plan outings around their children and extended family members, an older adult looking for community-specific events like LGBTQ+-friendly venues, and a competitive explorer who thrives on streaks and leaderboards. I also ran informal conversations with additional coworkers to broaden the sample. On the competitive side, I analyzed Google Maps, Instagram, and Facebook, examining what each platform does well, where users struggle based on reviews and feedback, and where clear gaps exist for a product like SightMark to fill.

Three themes emerged consistently across every interview. First, trust is broken. Users don't believe anonymous online reviews and default to asking friends and family instead, which limits their discovery to whatever their social circle already knows about. Second, the detailed information people actually care about is missing from every existing tool. Wheelchair accessibility, parking, family-friendliness, noise level, vibe, and cleanliness came up in nearly every conversation, yet no current platform lets users filter by any of them. Third, there is a clear split around gamification. Most users respond to personal progress mechanics like streaks and recaps but actively dislike public competition. Only one participant enjoyed leaderboards, which told me competitive features should exist but never be the default experience.

Trust became the foundation of every social feature. Instead of anonymous reviews, every piece of content on SightMark is tied to a visible user profile with an exploration history and earned badges. When you see a recommendation from someone who has checked into 50 restaurants and earned a "Foodie" badge, you trust it more than a faceless five-star review. The social graph of following real people you know is the trust mechanism.

Deep, inclusive filtering became a core differentiator rather than a secondary feature. This decision came directly from the research. Users can filter locations by wheelchair accessibility, family-friendliness, parking, vibe, noise level, and more. One interviewee highlighted that she makes decisions not just for herself but for her children and handicapped family members. That insight shifted the filtering system from "find what's good for you" to "find what's right for you and the people you're with."

Gamification was designed to be personal first and competitive second. Streaks, a Spotify Wrapped-style exploration recap, and milestone badges reward users for their own progress. The Wrapped concept came directly from an interviewee who described exactly that feature unprompted. Leaderboards exist for users who want them but stay in the background for everyone else.

The visual identity blends art deco elegance with modern dopamine design. The color palette uses jewel tones like emerald, sapphire, amethyst, and gold for a premium exploration feel, with warm coral and amber accents reserved for reward moments like check-ins and badge celebrations. Every color combination was tested against WCAG 2.1 accessibility standards, and every combination passes AA or higher. Typography pairs Josefin Sans for headings with Inter for body text and Playfair Display for special celebration moments.

The final product includes a complete design system built from the ground up covering color tokens with tint scales and dark mode support, a three-tier typography system, spacing and layout tokens, and component patterns for buttons, cards, map pins, inputs, navigation, and more. The system is documented in a portable format that works across both Figma and development tools like Lovable. Lo-fi and hi-fi prototypes were designed across all three required platforms: iOS app, mobile web, and desktop web. Each version was tailored to its primary use context. iOS for in-the-moment check-ins and photo sharing, mobile web for users arriving through shared links, and desktop for planning trips and browsing collections. Usability testing on the iOS prototype led to iterations on the check-in flow and filter interface before the hi-fi designs were finalized.

Designing SightMark reinforced that user research should drive product decisions, not assumptions. Features I initially planned as central, like public leaderboards, were deprioritized because the research didn't support them. Features I hadn't considered at all, like the Spotify Wrapped-style exploration recap, came directly from an interviewee and became a key part of the retention strategy. The most important lesson was that accessibility and inclusivity aren't special features you add at the end. They are core user needs that shape the entire product when you listen to the people who need them most. One interviewee's experience as a wheelchair user fundamentally changed how I designed the filtering system, the location detail page, and the attribute tagging system. That single conversation made the product better for everyone, not just users with disabilities.