OuterSpatial Search – a key entry point for outdoor adventurers to discover new trails, parks, recreation areas, and public sector organizations.
ROLE
Product Designer
TIMELINE
16 Weeks
RESPONSIBILITIES
Research, Information Architecture, Interaction, Visual & Prototyping, Testing
OVERVIEW
OuterSpatial's search serves as a powerful tool that allows users to efficiently sift through vast range of outdoor opportunities -- including trails, events, outings, challenges, alerts, articles, and more. However, usability challenges made it difficult for users to quickly find relevant locations and navigate search intuitively.
RESULTS
With an intuitive filtering system and intelligent search ranking, users can quickly refine their search queries based on their interests, whether they're looking for a specific hiking area, checking for upcoming community events, or staying informed on park alerts.
CHALLENGE
While search is a core feature of OuterSpatial's mobile platform, designed to help users sift through extensive databases of trails, events, challenges, parks, and more, our users were struggling to find the most relevant results from search inefficiencies.
Ultimately leading to abdandoned searches and missed opportunities for exploration.
How can we improve OuterSpatial's mobile search experience, so that users can quickly find relevant trails and parks, to confidently get results to match their preferences?
OUTCOME
Empower users to effortlessly explore a vast range of outdoor experiences
By transforming OuterSpatial's mobile search, we turned frustration into fluidity. A search experience that once required multiple searches, guesswork, and troubleshooting, now delivers instant, accurate results catered to the individual's needs.
COLLECTING INSIGHT
User interviews
Heatmaps and session recordings showed that users often scrolled through long lists of results rather than applying filters.
Interviews highlighted that users wanted predictive search suggestions to guide them toward relevant results.
Search analytics
Users frequently refined searches multiple times, modifying their inputs repeatedly before finding results that matched their needs.
Usability testing
Users found it difficult to distinguish between different types of results and information provided.
STRATEGIZE & DEFINE SOLUTION
From insights to implementation
Key user insights provided a clear direction for our design, emphasizing the need for better hierarchy, intuitive filtering, and smarter predictive assistance.
1. Better hierarchy
To improve the cognitive overload users' experienced when differentiating between various result types, we could:
- Introduce a category-based search facet that clearly grouped categories like trails, events, challenges, organizations, points of interest, and more
- Apply distinct typography, icons, and spacing to differentiate between categories and result types for easy scanablility
2. Intuitive filtering
With a vast database available to our visitors, they often got overwhelemed from the amount of results and abandoned search altogether. To create a more fluid and guided search experience we could:
- Introduce filters and one-tap quick-select preset filters to streamline customization
3. Predictive assistance
To reduce frustration from frequent search refining in order to find relevant results quickly, we could:
- Real-time query results that predicts relevant trails, parks, events, and challenges as users type
- Location-based recommendations that prioritize results based on a user's current location
FINAL DESIGN
Users can now find exactly what they need
What was once a frustrating and time-consuming process is now effortless. Users no longer have to struggle with endless scrolling or multiple search refinements; they can quickly customize their results and confidently plan their next outdoor adventure.
TAKEAWAYS
Achieving simplicity is actually not simple
From our user researching findings, our users wanted a "simple" search. However, creating a search experience that seems "simple," actually requires extensive research, leveraging data, and collaboration across teams for implementation.
Spending the extra time to really understand how users were using search and testing ideations proved to be worth it as we transformed OuterSpatial's search experience into a fast, intuitive, and highly effective tool for outdoor exploration.
✅ Search success rate increase by 42%
✅ Search-to-selection time decrease by 40%
✅ Filter usage increased by 50%
Next steps & edge cases
To further enhance the search experience, we hope to explore options like integrating a more personalized search recommendation by leveraging past searches and user behavior to predict relevant results.
Edge cases happen and it's important we keep them in mind as we go through the design process. One of the edge cases I experienced here involved location-based results. As user privacy is important and fully controlled by our users' preferences, we couldn't accurately show closest location results based off of a users' location if they chose not to share that with the application.
