Grant Anderson

New York, NY

Product Design at Google. Previously @socratic, @live, @foursquare and @Salesforce. Indie fanboy. Occasional freelancer.

Socratic: Groups — One of the largest features I've worked on since joining the team has been a focus on group chats for teens. Over the course of a few months we extensively researched how users might want to use such a feature and how we might entice them to do so, conducting over 50 user tests with realistic prototypes built with origami. The result is a flow built almost entirely around user need - one of th...
Socratic: Math stepper — Another priority for us for the core experience of the app was refining the pedagogy (method of teaching) for our math stepper, which essentially breaks down math problems step-by-step (get it?) for students. Lots of effort was put into updating the visual hierarchy as well as the FTUE (first-time user experience) of the card itself, auto-expanding to show the hints and expanded information st...
Socratic: Chat — One of the larger features I've worked at in my time at Socratic was one of our social components, chat. An overarching philosophy we have at the company is the idea that homework is inherently social, and providing teens with the ability to talk to one another while using our app and potentially work together to solve homework problems was a top priority. Another interesting finding we've lea...
Socratic: Nav — In the effort of making social a "first-class citizen" in our app, the nav structure had to be completely reworked, resulting in a pulldown menu for inviting friends into the app, a lefthand drawer for chat, and a righthand drawer for groups. Keyboard inputs were pushed to the bottom. Lots of inspiration was taken from Snapchat, particularly the complicated gestural system to let users quickly...
Socratic! — Excited to share what I've been working on the past year at Socratic, an education company focused on helping improve teen learning efficacy. It's refreshing to work on a team with such a noble mission statement, and particularly interesting to work with teens as a target user, something I've never done before. Pictured here are pieces of the features I've worked on since joining, including a ...
Live: Saved Lists — Coming from Foursquare, a feature that was important to me was the ability to save venues and events to a list for future reference, being able to access it at anytime (and view on the map), and share amongst others. Since Live is built around the map, that creates a lot of interesting use cases and interaction patterns. In a map that's already saturated with information, how do we add an extr...
Live: Search — Much more complicated than just the screens shown here, search was one of the tools given to users to cut through our vast amounts of event and venue data. Touched on before, each tool was meant to satisfy a different "explore mode," i.e. are you looking for a place to go now, or later? Do you know exactly what you want, or do you need guidance? The legend was intended to help users who were ...
Live: Legend usage — Excuse the janky GIF, but an 8mb limit on complicated animations is a tall order :) This was part of a prototype made to demo the intended usage of the filter drawer, or legend, to both potential users as well as our engineers. The entire drawer is a carousel, with each category separated by columns - users can scroll endlessly horizontally, as well as vertically through each column. After the...
Live: Legend — The filter drawer - or legend, as we started calling the feature -was a users main method of cutting through the vast amounts of venue and event data being returned. By displaying all available filters within a given map view, ordered by frequency, and reinforced with category colors, users could quickly filter down to a handful of interesting results, such as rooftop bars with oyster happy hou...
Live: Profile — While we never really intended to build the profile as part of our MVP, designs were still fleshed out to understand how the social features of the product might be used. It was thought that lists, or "Live Maps" would be the dream currency, allowing others to see how others use the app and ultimately how they think about a given city. These could even be used within the browse experience, turn...
Live: Browselist — The browselist was meant to provide the ease of navigating a map, while getting a deeper peek into venue info, all at the same time in a mobile format. Lots of thought was put into the back and forth of these separate interface elements, from the automatic highlighting of a specific venue within the list to turning off auto-fetching more venues to preserve the list ordering. The venues themsel...
Live: Map — One of the best parts about Live is the map. Lots of time was spent trying to figure out how we could show users not just the popular places within a given view but *every* option available. Additionally, how could the concept of an event happening *right now* be communicated? And finally, how could it be designed so that it didn't overwhelm the user? A dark themed map using a color system to ...
Live — Excited to finally share what I worked on from April 2015 to January 2017 - Live! A living map of all the events and places to go in your city, Live takes on the sizable challenge of simultaneously communicating breadth and depth. I'll be posting more shots in the days to come, but damn it feels good to finally share some new work. And check out the app!
Top Picks — I lied, one last foursquare shot. Top picks was just a concept when I worked on it (you can now see it in the app), but I always enjoyed these original, highly photographic explorations. The idea has remained the same - explicit feedback for users as to why they're receiving these recommendations.
Oldschool Profile — One last Foursquare shot I never got around to pushing, the old iOS7 Profile, one of the first things I worked on at the company. I still enjoy the color palette we ended up using, although I could never decide between the final version on the left or the alternate on the right.
Foursquare iPad Travel and Map results — Last couple shots of iPad for Foursquare. Since the primary use case of the iPad app was a more laidback approach to exploring, we wanted to highlight the benefit of using Foursquare abroad, so surfacing travel destinations with popular local dishes and activities quickly became a feature.
Foursquare iPad Homescreen to Search — Another shot of the Foursquare iPad app, scrolled down from the top of the homescreen. The original thought was as a user scrolls through the curated categories, if they reach the bottom, perhaps it makes sense to cast a larger net of suggestions since none of the previous ones matched their intent. At this point, we effectively dump users into a freeform search, complete with filters and the a...
Foursquare for iPad — Just getting around to posting one of the last pieces I worked on at Foursquare - the iPad app. The focus of finally releasing on the iPad revolved mainly around search and explore - while the phone use case is much more "on the go", iPad is designing purely for planning. This first screen is the main home page, giving users large, tabloid-like recommendations along with a new destination picke...
All the tastes — Final design directions for adding tastes in Foursquare 8.0 - the tastes game located in onboarding, and continued personalization living within the app. Working on the tastes game was incredibly fun.
Foursquare Venue Page — Venue page design for Foursquare 8.0
Onboarding Explorations — Some of the initial exploration work that went into making the Foursquare 8.0 onboarding experience. The "taste game" in particular was iterated upon many times before we felt we had something that captured both the depth and breadth of the overall tastes system.
Discovery Exploration — As with any project, there's lots of throwaway work - at the beginning of Foursquare 8.0, one area that received lots of exploration was the search & discovery experience. Here are just a few of paths the homepage could have taken.
Netflix/Facebook — Once upon a time, I was given a design exercise that speculated what a combined Facebook and Netflix app would look like. Product aside, I always liked the design direction it took.
Salesforce1 - Dashboards — Some iterations on home the eventual dashboard detail screens would look in Salesforce1 - a variation of the detail pages. This was worked on the beginning of 2013 at Salesforce.

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