284

submittable locations

224

participants

5

categories

OVERVIEW

OuterSpatial helps outdoor organizations, state and national parks, trail orgs, and conservation nonprofits engage the people who visit them. One long-running engagement tool is the photo challenge: visitors capture moments in a park and submit them across themed categories.

California State Parks had run its photo challenge for years, but on desktop. The challenge itself and its five categories were theirs. As CA State Parks' official mobile app, the opportunity was to bring it onto OuterSpatial and rethink it for how people actually use it outside, in the park.

THE PROBLEM

On desktop, capture and submission were split across time and place. Visitors experienced the park in the field, then had to remember to go home, sit at a computer, and upload afterward.

A desktop upload flow encodes an assumption: that the photo already exists and the user is sitting at a computer. That builds a mandatory “later, at home” step between experiencing the park and submitting to the challenge and every deferred step is a place to lose people. This one deferred across both time and place.

THE QUESTION

“How might we lower the barrier to entry by closing the gap between experiencing a park and submitting to the challenge?”

THE APPROACH

Submitting became a check-in, instead of an upload.

Rather than port the desktop flow onto a smaller screen, the submission was rebuilt around where the person is standing. Location moves from invisible metadata to the opening step, drawn from the park you are physically in.

THE FLOW

Either way in.

Someone can start with a category, wanting a shot for Living Wonders and then finding a place that fits, or start with where they're standing and pick the category after. Both routes converge on the same confirm, caption, and post.

Supporting both is the point. One route optimizes for the person who already has the shot; the other optimizes for the person who needs a reason to take one and that second case is exactly where the participation gap sits.

CORE DECISIONS

FIVE CATEGORIES

DESIGN

Designing for the field.

RESULTS

Share Your Space launched on the OuterSpatial mobile app with California State Parks, spanning 284 submittable locations across the state park system.

WHAT'S NEXT

The redesign moved submission into the park. What it has not done yet is give anyone a reason to come back a second time — which is the next thing worth designing for.