Josh: Starting with Gowalla 2.0, we baked in some new features to let users continue to use the app beyond the 10 seconds that it takes to check in. We let people leave comments about their location, upload photos, see where friends are, and find where most people in the neighborhood are going tonight. We wanted to support this almost toy-like interaction where you can just play with it and go in different directions and tangents based on your current location. I like this idea that you can kind of get lost in it, that there's a sense of exploring.
Still, the core activity is the check in, and it has to be optimized for that. The challenge is to do all these other things without adding more cruft to the interface. How do we allow for all of those kinds of angles, but still keep that process super simple? Those are the kinds of things that are a continual boxing match around here. I believe that you can have a dense level of information but still keep the flow extraordinarily simple.