The Company
Geocaching can best be described as a worldwide treasure hunt. Treasures, called “caches” or “geocaches” are hidden all around the world and users search for and find these caches by using the app to find the caches location based on location coordinates. Their mission:
To make everyone an explorer and every location an adventure.
The Challenge
Improve features of the Geocaching App while keeping business goals in mind.
The Details
Project: Concept
Duration: 2 weeks
Team Project: My role - UX Researcher and Designer
Devices: Desktop
My Process
Empathize
First our team wanted to get to know Geocaching competitors. Each team member researched a competitor and we created a feature inventory to see how Geocaching compared.
Takeaway: Geocaching is a leader in the space!
Journey Map
One of our lead researches created a Journey Map to help us understand a user’s emotions when using the Geocaching app.
Takeaway: The fun stops after a user logs a cache.
User Interviews
Each team member conducted a user interview. We decided it was important to interview people who were already familiar with the app. I personally conducted a remote interview with a geocacher who had hid over 600 geocaches!
2. Define
Affinity Map
After our interviews we came back together to synthesize our data by using an Affinity Map.
Our Affinity map left us with a few questions:
1. How might we reward user’s for their expertise?
2. How might we create more urgency and excitement for geocachers?
3. How might we create incentives for geocachers?
User Persona
We synthesized our research into a user persona, Eric The Geocacher. An outdoor loving individual who values acknowledgement of his achievements and wants to feel like an important part of the geocaching community. I then created our problem statement:
His Problem
Eric needs recognition when he reaches different geocaching milestones so that he can feel a sense of pride and share his excitement about his progress with the community.
User Flows
Before moving onto sketches, we worked together as a team to create user flows to help on lock down how our user would be interacting with the different app screens.
3. Ideate
Design Studio!!
Next we conducted a design studio with our team to get everyone’s ideas out in the open.
This exercise was helpful for us to generate lots of ideas quickly and led us to develop or design solutions for our user’s problems.
Design Solutions
Create a Level System.
User need: Recognizes the need of users wanting to be acknowledged for their accomplishments.
Business Need: Acknowledges the goal of user retention but motivating the user to use the app more.
In-App Social Sharing.
User need: This allows the user to connect with the geocaching community.
Business need: Addresses the business goal of more engagement within the app
Sketches
Our team worked together to agree on what features we would add to each screen. Then one other teammate and I created our final sketches.
Wireframes
Next I and my teammate Tommy created our wireframes.
4. Prototype
Tommy used InVision to create a medium fidelity prototype for user testing. Once testing was over he converted the wireframes to high fidelity, which is what you will see in the mockup below. Check out our prototype here.
5. Validate
Each team member conducted a usability test. We had two tasks:
Task 1: Find a geocacher in your area that’s on the same level as you and add them as a friend.
Task 2: Log that you’ve found a cache and share the accomplishment with the community.
Our goal was to identify potential pain points that could be improved in future iterations.
Insight 1:
Problem: “The ‘nearby’ and ‘my city’ filters are confusing."
Solution: Removed the filter buttons and replaced with adding your location and then searching for other user’s based on how far away they are from the location set.
Insight 2:
Problem: "I didn’t notice the filter icon."
Solution: Remove the filter icon and replace with the word “Filter”.
Insight 3:
Problem: "Why doesn’t it say the user’s location?”
Solution: Added the user’s location under their username for easy readability.
Next Steps
While we were excited about our solutions, our next steps are to:
Create an onboarding flow.
Create a verification system around finding a cache.
Improve the experience of hiding a cache.