OuterSpatial Social – fostering a space that bridges the gap between parks and recreation organizations and visitors who want to find new ways to get outside. 

ROLE

Product Designer

TIMELINE

12 Weeks

RESPONSIBILITIES

Research, Information Architecture, Interaction, Visual & Prototyping, Testing

OVERVIEW

OuterSpatial has been utilized as a platform for park recreations and organizations alike to deploy their application without writing code.

Organizations use OuterSpatial Manager to make their information available and visitors find the information they need to support their adventures. In return, the visitors share information about their experiences through product features – like events, challenges, and social tools. 

RESULTS

We implemented social tools in OuterSpatial mobile to encourage visitors to share their experiences, prioritizing experiences that could help organizations make the best decisions possible to improve the on-the-ground-visitor experience. 

CHALLENGE

Organizations were making information readily available for visitors via OuterSpatial, but had little to no insight on visitors' POV.

How can we implement a tool that bridges the gap between park recreations and organizations and visitors?

OUTCOME

Passionate communities that work together to protect our outdoor resources while having fun outside.

Incorporating the social tools feature onto OuterSpatial mobile empowered and encouraged visitors to share all types of experiences from their time in the parks. Opening up the platform to give visitors a voice and organizations a chance to listen.

COLLECTING INSIGHT

Business needs

OuterSpatial needs to incentivize and provide business value to our customers (park, rec and orgs) by creating a space that promotes vocalized visitors. 

Customer needs

Park, rec and orgs want to stay in the know with their visitors, to provide the best in-person experience possible.

User needs

Visitors want to feel like their voices are heard and valued, making a true impact in preserving their favorite outdoor recreation areas. 

"...there could be a risk becoming obsolute if can't reinforce value"

– team member

"it would be nice if we could be aware of certain types of posts visitors create, so we could be faster and more agile in reacting"

– org leader

"i want to be able to let park leaders and rangers know when i come across something potentially dangerous on my outings"

– regular visitor and OS user

Customers rarely catch feedback at the right time

Through interviews with our partner organizations, I found that our customers are realizing important information from visitors a little too late for them to yield the same impact if caught at the right time. In order for this to happen, an org/park/rec member would have to be on standby and constantly sifting through all content posted by their visitors. 

Visitors don't feel heard

Our users often utilize OuterSpatial as a way to save, post, and engage with others about outdoor adventures they come across. Some frequent visitors will post about a tree fallen or an active bee-hive on one of their favorite trails, in hopes to notify others for safety and to notify someone in the organization to take care of the situation professionally. 

STRATEGIZE & DEFINE SOLUTION

Bridging the gap

It was clear that we needed to introduce a social feature that allowed visitors to directly notify the organization hosting the respected area as well as alerting the community. 

OuterSpatial already supported "posts" as a social feature. To figure out what social tools to launch, we consulted our customers to figure out what information would be valued the most and we ran through the database to figure out what users were frequently posting about.

Customer values

Getting notifications in real-time for visitors reporting incidents or occurences 

Specify what type of incident occurred

Visitors' actions

Often posting updates on outdoor spaces and unintentionally giving feedback on how their experience went -> lumping every feedback option into one

Visitors participating in local challenges hosted by their organizations' community, would frequently post check-in updates 

IDEATE & ITERATE

We created a rough wireframe outlining the basic idea of: 1. Reporting an Incident and 2. Leaving a Review

It was crucial for us to check in with our organization partners at this stage. We needed to capture the details, especially of the Report flow, to ensure we were offering the correct reporting standards to our users. Alongside, we took this opportunity to refine our post feature for usability issues. This allowed us to design precisely for the most optimal usability feature.

FINAL DESIGN

Working together to preserve our outdoor parks

Creating space for organizations and the outdoor community to engage with one another to acheive one common goal: preserving precious parks of our world.

TAKEAWAYS

Fostering Collaboration

My thorough research and continuous iteration process led us to create an irreplaceable toolset within OuterSpatial. Empowering visitors to use their voice in ways they see beneficial while opening up the floor for organizations to diligently listen. 

Customer Value

Organizations seek OuterSpatial as a crucial platform, providing a way to grow the community and now make more informed developed based feedback from visitors around.

Business Value

Time is money. Freeing up time for our CX teams allowed them to focus on higher priority items and reduce repetition. Implementing self-onboarding results a large financial value. The faster organizations can get into Manager, the faster they can utilize OuterSpatial as a platform of service, making Manager a crucial tool to their business. 

User Value

Our visitors gain confidence in knowing that they are contributing to preserving and protecting their favorite outdoor recreation areas.