Challenge

HELP RAND MCNALLY BREAK INTO GEOCACHING INDUSTRY

Class Project: Rand McNally is known for creating and publishing various maps for more than a hundred years. They offer GPS devices and want to break into the geocaching digital space, a growing industry they feel they can make money in, but they are unsure where to begin. 

Solution

GEOCACHING APP WITH AN INTUITIVE UI AND Rand McNally's detailed MAPS

In order for Rand McNally to penetrate the geocaching digital space, they would need to create a mobile app that’s competitive in the market and leverages their expert map technology.

Our team created an interactive prototype of an intuitive geocaching mobile app and incorporated Rand McNally's maps. Afterwards,  I applied branding and visual design.

App Benefits

• Increase their business and gain them a positive reputation in the geocaching community

• Provide people better geocaching experiences using Rand McNally’s new app

• Promote sharing of the geocaching app with users and non-users and increase usage and Rand McNally's visibility

Process

No one uses Rand McNally GPS for geocaching and primarily uses mobile apps

Research showed that the majority of users used mobile apps and the Garmin handheld GPS for geocaching, but no one uses Rand McNally’s outdoor GPS, the Foris 850, for geocaching. In order for Rand McNally to break into this geocaching industry, they would need to create a competitive geocaching app. 

Design as research told us to

Research fueled every design decision and feature. From survey results, we found the features geocachers felt they needed in a geocaching app and incorporated those into our design. From competitive and comparative analysis, we learned that the app needed to have an intuitive user interface and enough features for geocachers to get the experience they need to be competitive.

Out in the wild

We went on our own very first geocaching trip together and were able to experience for ourselves some of the same motivations of the people who currently geocache. We discovered features like status updates on the cache icons when a cache is found and incorporated this into our app.

Non-geocachers will go if invited by a friend

For non-geocachers, almost all of them enjoy the outdoors and would join a geocache activity if invited. With this knowledge, we decided to add a social feature allowing current geocachers to invite their non-geocacher friends via the app to join them in the activity. An easy app experience could engage the non-geocachers into additional geocaching trips.

Keep drawing

Creating user flows and sketching helped us get a big picture idea of how everything would look like. Our ideas materialized into tangible features of the wireframes, and we were able to continue brainstorming and modifying the wireframes get to the final solution. 

The Deliverables

The interactive prototype

REFINE AND BRAND

After two more individual iterations of the flow to make the app more intuitive, I applied visual design and branding to the wireframes. 

I created a mood board and a style guide for consistency. This fueled the visual design.

The prototype with Visual Design and Branding

Results and Reflections

Putting away assumptions

Our team had all these assumptions for people’s geocaching experience and was lost as to where to begin to build our solution, but once we did research we were able to establish our scope and focus on the features that mattered the most to our business and our users.

“WELL-DESIGNED UI, BASIC BUT FUNCTIONAL”

We delivered an interactive prototype of the mobile app Geocache Hunt with a user-friendly interface that integrates Rand McNally’s expert map technology. It was well received from the clients.