YouMap: Revolutionizing Social Media with a Unique Social Media Map

Creating a New Way to Share Information and Connect Communities

The inspiration behind YouMap was the desire to help others following the Black Lives Matter protest in Baltimore, Maryland. This crisis, along with other major global events, illustrated the need to address problems with our current social media platforms. Specifically, the inability of social feeds to paint the bigger picture and better utilize information from the human crowd to share useful insights and information to others.

Most social networks give a premium to popularity. On YouMap, the most important person is the one on the ground with the information you need. A patented visualization system displays information ephemerally to track fast-moving events. Thousands of posts can be shown on a city block without any data overcrowding. Built for live reporting, our flexible moderated communities have customized post flows to give YouMap the purpose our users choose.

YouMap is a native app, currently only available on the iOS platform. The app combines social media and maps, enabling users to create a map of important moments in their lives by marking places or events. A map is a geospatial data collection where users may add social posts and import data such as photos. Users can share their maps with others or join already created maps, where they can add new content. They can control how information is shared on the maps by using configurable fields, such as value sliders, star ratings, multi-select, and other areas that can all be edited. YouMap is a one-of-a-kind experience for creators and communities.

Maps are the basic foundational component in YouMap. A map in YouMap is a geospatial dataset where social postings are made and where data is imported. Our user onboarding includes a series of interactions that result in a tailored experience facilitating both fun exploration and. As such, a user is able to interact with map creating tools that enable customization based on the user’s needs.

YouMap’s 4 approved patents reflect considerable design challenges. We aimed to bring value from unstructured data locked in the human crowd. Data on most social platforms is unstructured, limiting value. YouMap’s content blocks structure human data like an API would. It was a challenge to display thousands of posts without crowding. This was overcome by gathering cues about a post’s importance and showing more important posts at a higher zoom resulting in a 30,000-foot view of our human world.

The YouMap project has been ongoing in Cracow since 2019. The design team, consisting of Marta Stec, Ewelina Knotek, Łukasz Grobelny, Stephen Constantine, Michael Milner, Mateusz Jurkiewicz, Anna Karlińska, Ewa Zielińska, Karolina Olejniczak, Antoni Matusz, Oliwia Łakatosz, Szymon Matysik, Mateusz Glapiak, Kacper Kaliński, Łukasz Boruń, and Piotr Chaja, has utilized tools such as Sketch, InVision, Adobe After Effects, Miro, and Zeplin to realize this innovative design.

YouMap has received the prestigious Iron A' Design Award in 2022. This award recognizes well-designed, practical, and innovative creations that meet professional and industrial requirements. Respected for integrating industry best practices and competent technical characteristics, they provide fulfillment and positive feelings, contributing to a better world.

With YouMap, social media is taken to a new level, allowing users to connect with their communities and share information in a more meaningful and impactful way. By combining the power of maps and social media, YouMap is revolutionizing the way we interact and engage with each other.

Image Credits: Marta Stec, 2022

Video Credits: Marta Stec, 2021