Josh: The early design was extraordinarily bare-boned. We just wanted to figure out how to specify a location both on the phone and in the database so that you can "pick up" or "drop" an icon at a certain location. So really for about six weeks we were playing around with something that was completely utilitarian just to see if we could make it work.
When we finally got this prototype working, we discovered that it kind of sucked. For anyone who just picked it up, it made no sense whatsoever. We didn't see all the problems while we were designing it, because we knew how it worked and we knew what it was supposed to do. So we'd been looking at it through the goggles of how we imagined it would be used. But unless you had one of us there to explain how it worked, you wouldn't get it. The reality was that no one had really done anything like this before—this idea of mixing a virtual scavenger hunt on top of a location-based social network. We made all these assumptions that we thought made perfect logical sense from a design standpoint, but it turns out that a lot of those assumptions were off.