Over the past eight months, the Swarm team has been hard at work researching, prototyping, and building towards Swarm 5.0. On Tuesday, we launched. (Go download Swarm 5.0 now.) It was a big undertaking that involved a lot of people. Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley has already shared why we made me these changes, which means I can explain what, precisely, we were up to all this time.

As a product designer working on Swarm, some of the pieces I specifically worked on for 5.0 included simplifying the information architecture, updating our internal style guide, redesigning the home screen and the…