Futureland 2

Kent joined Vin and me at Futureland at the beginning of 2024 as lead designer, after which we decided to improve the overall user experience.

The idea was to rebuild Futureland from the ground up, creating a native iOS-first version of the tool we built over the last 4 years. We didn't just let Kent redesign the UI but fundamentally improved the whole experience. We started by consolidating the Futureland 1 journal entries and the Metrics feature we built in 2023, which lets 's users track anything, into one thing. This allows our users to have maximum flexibility in how they use Futureland and what they can track.

One major pain point of Futureland 1 was that it only worked when users had a working internet connection. We made the decision early on that Futureland 2 will be an offline-first tool that will work anywhere at any time. This way our users would have all their journal entries and tracked habits always in their pocket. This had the neat side effect that the app is extremely fast. Having everything stored locally eliminated all kinds of loading times users had to endure before.
Being iOS-first also meant having a great shortcuts and widgets experience for users which helped us integrate Futureland deeper into our users's daily workflows.

I never collaborated as closely with a designer as with Kent before. I also never had this much fun working with someone before. We were calling almost every day, and at some point we were extremely quick to get things from our heads into the app. Every day we required fewer words to get our ideas across. I had the feeling of doing the best work of my career.