geocaching lists
How can we make Lists a more valuable experience for new and tenured members?
client: Geocaching
role: lead product designer
duration: dec. 2018 - july 2019
what exactly is Geocaching?
Geocaching is an outdoor recreational activity, in which participants use a Global Positioning System receiver or mobile device and other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers, called "geocaches" or "caches", at specific locations marked by coordinates all over the world. (Source: Wikipedia)
In other words, Geocaching in a lot of senses is like real life treasure hunting. Players are also presented usually with a riddle or hints per geocache in order to locate it. All geocaches and the contents are user-created.
After I understood how the game works by finding geocaches with myself and my colleagues, and the game rules, I wanted to understand the players who were passionate about the game.
Who am I designing for?
I developed these categories based off prior research and my own user interviews. Coming up with these categories helped me stay accountable to how people may feel navigating through the Lists experience and keep track of specific use cases.
free green members
These are defined as users who are new to the game, and have less than 5 cache finds.
They might not know that List Hub exists due to paywall, but they are able to see other players’ List Details, whether or not they are aware of that.
"What premium features would be useful for me?"
"I want an easier entry to try before I buy."
"What are my possibilities interacting with my own content?"
"How do I get involved with other people’s content?“
"Geocaching is hard.”
In sum how can we help these individuals, consume Lists easier?
free experienced members
These members are able to see list details, but when they attempt to create a pocket query, there is a paywall. The only point of interaction here is creating a PQ.
Their concept of “List Hub” is potentially going to another user’s profile and going to “Lists”.
“How is this new list more useful for me?”
premium experts
“Please don’t take away my features!”
“Make this a little easier for me to interact with my own content.”
Interestingly enough, we found that there are a large number of premium members who are not using Lists. We suspected that perhaps the discoverability of premium features were not surfaced enough.
"What features can I look forward to enhancing my geocaching experience?"
“lackeys”/admins
These members have the ability to support and/or delete and monitor bad behavior (profane titles, images, etc.) that are public facing along with all the other features that premium members enjoy. We had to consider that there were probably features and functions that we needed to display for these individuals.
Unpacking past research
I read a fantastic in-depth paper from a higher level perspective to understand further the motives and interests that hooked players from the start up to the level of experience they have now. I believe this would help me understand why and how they pick out geocaches that they plan on looking for.
There were also past studies conducted on users who were remote or even out of the country using UserTesting.com going through their geocaching browsing experience.While digging deep into a whole breadth of information, I also spoke with players in the lobby as well as my fellow colleagues that played that game on a regular basis. All of this information gathering gave me a pretty good baseline as to how I wanted to conduct further research centering on the psyche of creating Lists of geocaches.
Most active Geocachers are within the U.S. and Western Europe, primarily Germany.
Geocachers range from solo cachers, people who go in groups (like families) or use it as a team-bonding activity.
An average Geocacher's age can range from 30s ~ 50s.
what we were working with
I had to understand the UI landscape of the current List experience. This helped me understand how many high level user flows that we needed to examine, and other areas within Geocaching that Lists was impacting.
list hub
The list hub was optimized to not only fit for desktop experiences, but once it is opened up on a smaller port size like a mobile phone, it scaled very easily. For context, I also found out that this was the most updated area of the Lists experience. Though it was updated, there were areas of concern when I familiarized myself with it.
list details
Once a user navigates into a List, they are brought to the legacy view of a List's details. As we can see here, aesthetically speaking it did not match the same patterns as the List Hub. We discovered lists as long as 3000+ geocaches! Imagining how a geocacher would look for geocaches on another person's list or their own would be quite the hassle.
heat mapping
I was curious what areas of the List Hub and the List Details pages had the most level of interaction. Next, I wanted to understand, why?
feature tracking
Because retaining present functionality was extremely important to current users, we ensured that we covered our bases by cataloguing functionalities between free users and users paying for features.
card sorting
Next, I took each interaction point in both the List Hub and List Details to see where users expected to see specifics or actions, and which ones they’d expect to interact with more readily.
identifying top level navigation
After we let the survey run over a course of about 3 weeks, the card sorting was then put into a standardization grid to see where the highest counts of each point of interaction were placed as well as seeing any intersections between certain areas of the product.
wireframing
After conducting the card sorting activity with a grand amount of support, I felt that I had sufficient amount of data in how to properly group together functions and categories and apply them to my wireframes.
voting
We came up with 6 choices to present to the company as whole. We granted each person 3 dots to mark their favorite layout based off functionality and aesthetic.
The mockups were printed and placed near the cafeteria to generate as much traffic as possible. Participants were also allowed to give their feedback via color coded sticky notes. As it is naturally a FUBU (for us by us) type of product, we figured this would be the best sample size to utilize to make an informed decision on a wireframe.
assumptions
As a team we spent numerous sessions interacting with users of all levels via different mediums such as forums, in person, going on geocaching expeditions, over coffee, etc. We compiled narratives, bucketed major opinons and overall came up with two major demographics to help us with product and design direction and to check in with our own biases.
roadmapping
We took an extensive look at every nook and cranny that Lists has touched in the Geocaching environment as a team. Once we laid it all out, we prioritized what areas to tackle first in order to give our players the most cohesive experience possible without shocking them with a completely different environment. Our more than awesome product manager led a war room that allowed us to take each aspect of the product and the data collected to properly conduct the rollout.
“clumping”
The card-sorting exercises also allowed me to see what actions and expectations overlaps between higher level categories and concepts. This also helped determine the direction of where to place certain points of interaction in the core user flows via wireframing.
what went into production
Though a bit risky, after evaluating the data we have collected both quantitative and qualitative, we decided that it would be best to go ahead and drop this in production. This allowed us to use a staging environment to test amongst geocachers from a range of skills locally.
testing, outcomes and reception
Change with positive intentions does not guarentee positive reception
Engagement with Lists overall increased
Actions were more easily accessed but some actions that more expert users were fond of were made a little more “complicated”
Even though we tried to cover all types of users for feedback, vocal veteran users were not embracing change