Enquire Is A Lightweight Q&A App To Explore Your Neighborhood

Meet Enquire, yet another Q&A app. But this time, it’s all about creating a simple experience to discover new things in your neighborhood. You don’t have to share images like on Jelly, you can’t ask non-location-based questions like on Quest. It’s all about tuning into your neighborhood and reading and participating with the public feed of questions and answers.

“We want you to come to a neighborhood for the first time and be able to discover what’s cool thanks to Enquire,” co-founder and CEO Maxime Leroy told me at a tech conference last week.

When you first launch Enquire, you can only see questions related to your current neighborhood. For now, the app works in New York, Paris and San Francisco. When you select your neighborhood, you will get the public feed of questions, with each question filling up the screen. You push the big button at the bottom, and you can read the answers.

Overall, the app is very straightforward and easy to understand. It has a clean and polished user interface with an emphasis on bright solid colors. Much like Frontback, Mindie, Flink and Facebook Paper, every question is a different screen. To see the next question, you swipe left. It creates a very addictive and engaging user experience.

There isn’t any gamification aspect to Enquire for now. You can’t see questions in other neighborhoods as long as you haven’t been there. Finally, while the app isn’t anonymous, you can choose your username when you sign up (and your imagination is the limit).

I’ve been checking the app every now and then for the past week, and I find it quite entertaining. I’m always eager to learn more about my neighborhood, and it’s a much more personal experience than browsing Foursquare or a city guide.

As Enquire was developed by a French team based in New York, the app already has a bunch of users in New York and a few users in Paris. The company plans to open more cities as soon as enough people are interested in the app. The idea is to get enough active users instead of launching a ghost town.

And it’s true that the app lacks a large and active user base. For now, I can see that only a few dozens users are active in Paris’ startup neighborhood. Enquire was just launched last week, so it’s normal. But I really hope that more users will get on board to make Enquire useful in the long run.

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