Our mission with Rover is simple.
We are building Rover to take the world and it’s curiosities further by helping people discover content that inspires and moves them forward.
We are announcing the latest version of Rover for the iPhone that’s specifically optimized for the iPhone 6S and iOS 9.
The 4 main features we’re going to talk about are,
- 3D Touch for User Similarity Preview
- 3D Touch for Interest Preview
- New Discover & Search Page
- Quick Actions from the home screen
In many ways, Rover is a community organized around interests. A Rover profile is a quick way for you to get a sense of what someone is into. And now we’ve made it even more fun to see how much you have in common with friends and other people you know, in terms of your interests :)
By using 3D touch on a user’s profile, users can quickly view their “similarity” score and common interests with another Rover user.
Rover’s similarity score is a quick snapshot of your overlap in taste with someone. It is both ridiculously fun to try out on people you know as well as a neat way to decide whether you want to follow someone new on Rover.
Interestingly enough, we tried this feature among everyone in the office and found that none of us had a similarity score higher than 30% :). Probably not surprising given how diverse everyone at Rover is in terms of their interests and hobbies. However, we also tried this feature among family, friends and significant others that we share interests with and found a high similarity score among these connections.
We’ve also extended 3D touch to preview interests in a very special way. By pressing down on an interest category, users will get a preview of the trending articles and friends who are also interested in that topic. If the user were to 3D touch ‘Music,’ Rover would give the user a preview of any friends that share this interest as well as the top trending stories for that interest.
This feature makes it easier than ever to quickly browse interest categories without losing your spot on the home feed.
Another feature that we are excited to highlight is our ever improving discovery page. Our new discovery view showcases carefully curated channels such as, ‘For you’, ‘Inspirational’, ‘Friend’s Top Picks’, and ‘Popular Today’, among others. The goal here is to introduce you to new interests and new content that might otherwise not hit your radar.
Today we live in a confining bubble where our online social networks and the publications we frequent tend to focus our attention on a few things, offering a very narrow view of life. Rover is about exploration. We want to bring you something new and fresh that lets you expand and grow as a person. When we stop discovering, we stop living and begin existing.
These channels are meant to make discovery a fun daily routine. The discovery page also allows users to easily find and follow tastemakers in the topics they care about.
The core search experience has also been improved significantly. If a user searches for ‘Design,’ they can now scroll through related interests inside of design, without ever leaving the search page, making it possible to scroll through many related interests like ‘Minimalism, Fashion design, and UI by simply switching between search tabs.
The improvements are not only confined to within the app. Starting from the home screen, Rover now makes searching a topic, checking notifications and browsing trending articles a one step process with iOS 9’s quick actions.
We hope you like the latest Rover as much we enjoyed building it for you. Let us know what you’d like to see next. The Rover team is hard at work re-imagining the future of discovery and we have some really awesome features planned for you. Thank you for using Rover.
