Seen was a web service that automatically created visual stories, recreating live events from real-time photos, videos and tweets shared by billions of smartphones from around the world. It did this by monitoring and mining social media, detecting events as they happened and then sorted, ranked and organized each nugget of data similar to Google’s PageRank. Its mission was to be the first place to experience stories as they unfolded and also to serve as the best place to relive these events.
Seen utilized instant ranking algorithms and data analysis, then formatted the event into beautifully designed templates. Templates included timelines, galleries, and mix-media reels and they were selected based on various factors like event type and size, availability of media and ideal distribution method.
Through engineering and design collaboration, both teams set out to define the ideal format for Seen events by working in parallel at separate ends of the problem. Engineering perfected and fine-tuned the event detection algorithm, while design and editorial envisioned and tested the ideal format of each story. The goal was to meet in the middle. While designing and prototyping, we spent a lot of effort pointing our event detection engine at various event types and getting back real data, letting us experiment with formats in real time.
Seen's automatically generated web pages were ripe for Google, giving our events plenty of organic search distribution. At our peak, Seen was getting 50 million monthly impressions to our full archive of events. We used this user traffic to better understand which events and formats worked best, who our ideal visitors were and what they wanted.
Seen.co discontinued service in 2015, and Mahaya pivoted to Katch.me
Product Strategy
UX/UI Design
Prototyping
Branding & Illustration
Mahaya
2014-2015