TheSquare Mobile App
Mobile app, iOS · 25 screens
Concept project. Built as a thought experiment on thesqua.re’s publicly observable product. Numbers are illustrative, not shipped outcomes.
Snapshot
The employee-facing surface that pairs with TheSquare Hub. Same booking reference, TSQ-25475: the corporate buyer manages the stay in the Hub, and the employee lives inside it here. The persona is Sam Patel, on a 30-night work trip, 15 July to 14 August 2026, in a Notting Hill Garden Studio at 165 pounds a night.
Problem
I started by diagnosing the live site, not by playing with a kit. A one-page gap analysis compared thesqua.re to Blueground, Sonder, and Airbnb monthly stays. Three top gaps:
- The site sells a hotel; the user is buying a temporary home.
- The trust scaffold is a testimonials carousel and a contact number, set against a 4,000 to 15,000 pound purchase.
- The search is a generic OTA pattern, destination, dates, guests, with none of the long-stay filters (wifi speed, desk, in-unit washing machine, lift, neighbourhood) that a multi-month stay actually turns on.
The thesis in one line: thesqua.re is a brochure with a contact form glued on. The fix is a logged-in mobile booking app with a long-stay aware search wizard on top. That single architectural move addresses ten of the eleven named gaps in the diagnosis.
The build, four moves
- Residential positioning over hospitality. Copy, imagery, and hierarchy sell a temporary home, not a hotel room.
- An account shell. The same person never re-enters the same data twice.
- A long-stay aware search wizard. Filters that matter for a multi-month stay, surfaced where the decision happens.
- Booking-attached add-ons. Transfer, welcome basket, family bundle, workspace upgrade, replacing the kit’s irrelevant “Online Experiences” with practical stay services.
The checkout math holds: 165 pounds by 30 nights is 4,950. A 20 percent long-stay discount removes 990, leaving 3,960. Add-ons bring the total to 4,110, shown as one all-in price with a breakdown one tap away, because this buyer is a consumer, not a finance team.
Two of the original 27 kit screens were excluded: a flight booking screen that had nothing to do with serviced apartments, and a duplicate confirmation. Both sit in an excluded folder with the reason in the filename. Cutting is the work.
Target impact
Illustrative, not measured: a logged-in app with long-stay search should lift qualified inquiry quality, reduce drop-off at the trust gap, and create the repeat-stay surface the brochure cannot.
Reflections
The eleventh gap, a post-booking trip dashboard, is set up by the booking confirmation screen but deliberately out of scope. The first review pass also caught a date defect (29 nights labelled as 30) that broke the checkout math; every reference was fixed before shipping. The lesson stuck: any number in a case study gets a math check, every time.