MakeYourMaps

A Local Guide App

Context: MakeYourMaps is a local guide app that allows users to view maps, discover local attractions and businesses, and determine routes, as well as to contribute to the app by reviewing or commenting on places of interest.

Objective: To review the contributor features on MakeYourMaps and devise a plan to improve one of them with the goal of improving how users can find new places of interest in order to increase the number of users, thus increasing revenue for the business.

Role: Product Manager

Timeline: 2 months

Tools Used: SurveyMonkey, Zoom, Pen and Paper

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User Research

In order to maintain a user-centric process to address user needs and wants, I used a combination of qualitative and quantitative research to determine users’ pain points and to glean ideas for new features.

The target audience for my research are professionals with the money and time to travel frequently outside of their local areas.

The major challenge at this stage was to determine how to glean information: whether quantitative data or qualitative data in the form of open-ended questions would produce more valuable data.

The Target User Persona

Christine Henderson
“If there were one app where I could plan local activities and all my traveling, I would never leave!”

Age: 35 years old
Occupation: Medical Professional
Status: Single
Location: Raleigh, NC

Maria, a medical professional, loves to travel. She has friends and family all over the world whom she visits. She enjoys hiking, dining, art, museums, and other cultural attractions. While visiting friends and family, she enjoys striking out on her own for portions of her trip and needs a reliable app to determine what attractions to visit and what restaurants to eat at.

Goals and Needs

Streamline planning before and during travel
Reliable attraction and restaurant information
Reliable mapping of potential destinations

Motivations

Time for enjoyable experiences is maximized
Spending quality time with friends and family at home and while traveling

Frustrations

Time wasted flipping between multiple apps
Time wasted locating and navigating between places while traveling

‍Everyday Activities

Exercise
Work
Gardening
Choir
Planning activities for friends and family

Research Data Analysis

Research revealed that:

80% of respondents use their local guide app before and during travel.
60% of survey respondents expressed that they leave the app to do destination research

“When I enter my final destination, I would like to be able to select a secondary destination from a menu by business type (restaurant, hotel, gas station, hospital). After choosing that, I would like to see a list of nearby businesses in the category that shows distance and customer rating. Selecting a particular business should then add this destination to the route.”

Respondents want:

The ability to search for directions between locations where one is not the current location
To see business and attraction recommendations for a destination
Filters for businesses and attractions at a destination
“Open early” and “Open late” filters
Suggested forms of travel at a destination

Using an impact effort matrix, I decided to prioritize the following features:

Create a feature where users can pinpoint a destination as a starting point for directions.
Create a feature where users can pinpoint a destination from which to set a search radius for businesses and attractions
Create filters for businesses and attractions at a destination

I chose not to prioritize:

"Open early" and "open late" filters would require little effort but also have little user impact
Providing a suggested form of travel at a destination would require aggregating several forms of data

Creating features where users can pinpoint a destination and then find and filter businesses and attractions and get directions would:
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1. improve usability and satisfaction with the key demographic of frequent travelers and
2. provide a unique feature to retain existing users and attract new users
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With solutions defined, I broke down the features into discrete tasks by creating epics and user stories. This was the most challenging task as the various solutions felt interconnected. As I teased out acceptance criteria, however, I began to see how they could be tackled separately.

An additional challenge at this stage was to set personal attachment to ideas aside in order to prioritize tasks. Using a specific prioritization method made this process easier to tackle.

Making my ideas tangible was an exciting next step. Without a background in design, I chose to use pen and paper in order to more clearly define each step users would take in the new feature.

Finally, I needed to decide what metrics to use to determine if the implemented features were successful. The challenge on this task was to think through what would provide the best evidence of success: monthly active users or daily or weekly active users. Ultimately, I chose monthly active users because a higher number of monthly active users would indicate that users are returning to the app over long periods, demonstrating that they are using the app before and throughout travel.

What went well: Extracting insights from data and prioritizing tasks. These are skills I bring form my professional background as a researcher and teacher. Without a design background, I was also surprised at the positive feedback for the wireframes I created.

What was challenging: With a relatively weak technical background, teasing out discreet tasks and assigning acceptance criteria. As a product manager, however, I can rely on expertise of the technical members of my team.

What did I learn: The importance of returning to the data from user research to maintain a user-centric approach in order to drive the success of the product. Ultimately, I'm confident that the "create an itinerary" feature will provide users with a unique feature that will increasing the user base and allow MakeYourMaps to dominate the local guide app space.