Travel guides, Urban Daddy, Yelp; while these are excellent resources for finding the pulse of a city, that pulse is often buried under trivial tourist traps, ad dollars and dated information. Enter Urbandig, an insider’s guide offering users unique city guides curated by local experts.
These guides are not just any run-of-the-mill list of recommendations; instead, these guides run the gamut from offering up the best spots for late night grub to retracing Charles Manson’s most notorious stops.
Interested? Learn more after the jump.
The Basics
Barely launched a few weeks ago, Urbandig is still a newbie on the local discovery app scene, however the useful guides diligently curated by local urban experts combined with the quirky rabbit mascot shows promise.
Urbandig's quirky rabbit mascot
At its most basic form, Urbandig provides a list of specialized guides. These guides are themed and can range from a Blade Runner shot list location tour (Los Angeles) to the crowd-favorite Cougar Dens (hello, Demi Moore) bar guide (San Francisco and Los Angeles). Urbandiggers can do the full tour, or just use the list as a guide for anything that might pique their interest.
Ready to start Diggin’?
Get started on your “off the beaten path” experience by creating a user name, password and selecting your city. Currently, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Vancouver are the only cities to choose from, however Portland, New York, Austin, Minneapolis, Chicago and Washington DC are scheduled for later this year.
After you have selected your user name and city, Urbandig takes you to the main Start page. Here you will find a scroll view of the city’s featured guides. At the bottom of the main screen is a scroll view of that city’s curators. Before I get into the in’s and out’s of the curator’s section on the app, let’s work out all the details of the main premise of UrbanDig, the content.
Home screen and a list of City Gem Guides
On the main Start page, you can choose one of the featured guides, or you can tap the Browse icon. The Browse page is divided into three sections: Categories, Curators and Nearby. The categories include such basics as City Gems, Drink, Fashion/Style, Food, Film, Music, etc. Once you choose a category, the page view changes to show the city guides that fall under your chosen category.
When you first start out, Urbandig provides a transparent overlay offering tips to help get you started. If you are like me, you will impatiently tap out of it before reading in order to get to the next page. Don’t worry, this app is fairly easy to navigate and the home buttons never disappear from the bottom of the screen.
Cougar Dens Tour with transparent overlay instructions and without
Alright, first guide up to bat is Cougar Dens.
Once you tap on a guide or tour, you will be directed to the homepage for that guide. On this homepage, there will be the general information about the guide, which includes the number of relevant locations, if the tour can be done in one day, a basic description, the author’s image and blog and the ability to save, share or “like” the guide. At the top of the screen you can dive right into the list of locations by tapping the Start tab, or you can tap the Places tab and be taken to the same location. You can also review the locations of your tour with the map tab.
When you check into the venue, the checkin shows up on your Urbandig feed
Once you tap on your first location, more detailed information will pop up on your screen. This includes the Curator’s notes, photos, location (I think they should include a phone number for reservations), the ability to share, save, “like” and check in. Once you check in, a green check mark will show up on the map for that location, helping you keep track of which Cougar Dens you have already raided, er, visited.
When you check into a location it will also appear as a green check mark on the location map
As promised, back to the Curators.
The Curators are the bones of this app, as they are the chosen urbanites offering up their handpicked favorite spots as a guide to the city for your enjoyment. The curators range from food critics to fashion bloggers and there is quite an eclectic collection of recommendations as a result.
The Browse section features a map that shows the locations of the closet venues featured in one of the guides and the list of Curators
At the main Start page, the curators are featured at the bottom of the screen, these smiling faces are the keyholders to the city. Each curator has a profile, which lists the number of followers, and the number of tours they have created.
Extras
As with almost every app these days, Urbandig offers a social sharing feature. When you sign up, you create a profile, and every “like,” checkin and follow is documented in your personal feed. When you follow other Urbandiggers their personal feeds are supposedly shown in your feeds. Unfortunately, as the app is so new, there isn’t too much action happening in my personal feed. Currently, the only way to share the guides is by email, however “likes” and checkins are only shareable in the native app through the feed function.
You Dig?
Overall, I think Urbandig is a great concept for a local discovery app. By utilizing local experts to curate content, the resulting guides are interesting, fresh and best of all, useful. While the graphics used throughout give off a Donnie Darko vibe (blame it on the rabbit ears), I find the quirkiness amusing.
The only thing that Urbandig needs to work on is the social sharing and the “likes.” I found it slightly irritating that I could “like” a specific note by a curator, which would then translate on my feed as liking that venue rather than a particular note about that venue. So if I “liked” multiple notes on the same location, I essentially “liked” that location multiple times in my feed. I’m guessing the intention of this feature was similar to Foursquare’s tips, but I honestly think it is unnecessary.
I also was unable to change my profile picture from a rabbit head silhouette to, well, anything else, which is unfortunate. As the app the just recently released and is still in Beta mode, I imagine the little glitches will be taken care of shortly. Regardless, I think that Urbandig is a great tool and I can’t wait for it to take root in more cities.