Geocaching App
I took an active role in all phases of product development, including understanding user needs and pain points, gathering business requirements, creating architectural flowcharts and storyboards, testing designs with focus groups, writing UX specifications for the engineering team, and then designing the interface.
I created flows, wireframes & prototypes for key game features in collaboration with the product team. Helping the development teams implement the user experiences.
I gathered qualitative and quantitative user feedback to optimize existing UX designs and inform new ones. Created Motion samples and animations for Devs to implement.
Also Lead the team in an effort to become more lean and agile, introducing the leadership at the company to user-centric OKR goal-setting and setting metrics of success, as well as story mapping and reflections. The company has now implemented much of this into its methodology.
User Research
During my time at Geocaching, I was lucky enough to be sent to Germany, to go hunting for treasure with real cachers! Germans were known for being more hardcore, and we wanted to see how hardcore they really were. I was able to repel down a cliffside, go geocaching at night, and climb trees to collect caches.
We hid out in an Air BnB, where cachers would stream in to be interviewed by us. I captured our notes as a journey map as we listened to our active users. We learned a ton and came home with great insights!
Lean UX at Geocaching
When I joined Geocaching, most projects were CEO-driven, and there wasn’t a clarified set of metrics-driven goals to work toward. Often we would work on these projects, and find that they weren’t solving real user problems.
I recommended starting a bi-weekly process meeting to analyze our current value stream and identify small improvements over time. I called it “Meth lab” (methodology lab) in order to give our team a good chuckle.
After a few months, and a few facilitated workshops with leadership, we were able to move away from building what felt “cool” to building what users really wanted and needed. We also had metrics of success and a way to prioritize our feature work.
UX & Design
I worked primarily as a UX designer, partnered with another designer, who fleshed out the final polish and owned the design pattern library. I spent most of my time creating prototypes, Wires, Flows, and testing with Users. I started each month by drafting a research plan that highlighted what we wanted to learn for the month, across many different features. I built out supporting tests to put in front of users throughout the month. This allowed me to keep my work user-centric.
Design
The app improved significantly during my time with this team, I was able to work on a set of new icon styles that we used going forward and designed many of the new flow and screens.