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Routes

Helping Relive users find their next adventure

We started to see signals from the market that there might be a demand for routes. So I was challenged to design an expereince for this feature and help Relive users to find and navigate routes around them.

Company

Relive

Date

July 2022

Project duration

3 weeks

The problem

At some point, we started seeing signals from our users that there might be interest in routes. It made sense for us from the strategy perspective since Relive wanted to be more than a video artefact from one's outdoor experience. It aspired to support our users at every step of their outdoor journey. Starting from exploring and choosing where to go and ending with that video artefact at the end of the adventure. That's how we decided to give routes a try. Relive already had the leverage of tons of GPS data recorded from user activities, so we created and matched around 10K routes in less than a month. It wasn't very clear to us what is that minimal lovable product we could deliver to our users to see some signals that we have to invest more. None of us had any experience with building a routes & navigation app, but we were curious and passionate, so we made it work.

The method

Before jumping into solution, I did competitor analysis. From my previous user interviews, I already knew what apps our users use when searching and navigating the routes. Researching these apps has given me a better idea of which features are must-haves and which are nice-to-have. I also watched dozens of YouTube videos with hikers where they explain their routines. This helped me to get a better understanding what are the other essential pieces of experience I might have overlooked in my research. The next stage was synthesising our learnings and agreeing on the minimum lovable product we could create. When introducing a new feature to an existing product, it is vital to understand the relationship between that new feature and the existing ones. For this, I use object mapping and writing down all the attributes every given object might have. After a day full of workshops, we reached an agreement on what might be the shape of the routes feature. So I went to the drawing board and designed a vison how might 10x experience look like.

Later we discussed and scoped my design vision with the team to see what was feasible. As a team, we decided to place the main door to routes on the Record page as it made sense conceptually.

Result

After over a month of routes being live, we haven't noticed any impact. Users seemed to be utterly blind to our route suggestions. I watched dozens of user recordings and sent several surveys and invitations for user interviews trying to get some understanding of why this might be happening. We ran several experiments surfacing routes feature even more, which was also fruitless.

After all the investigations, we concluded that we are not offering enough routes. Relive has several millions of users worldwide; 10K of generated trails aren't helpful for the majority, so this is why we didn't see results at scale. Chances were high that the routes offered were too far or too familiar for our users to take them.

So we decided to give Routes another go. This time we decided to focus on quantity over quality when it comes to the selection of routes. And to focus on one isolated English-speaking market instead of focusing on all users. This meant that we have to repeat the process all over again.

Moving on

After creating another wireframy vision for Routes and scoping it down with the team, I moved to the final UI. There were some technical challenges and limitations along the way, for example, we couldn't generate a meaningful name for a route. So we decided to go without route names (I am sure you haven't noticed it).

To be frank, I was pretty concerned about the absence of names because everything on the internet has a name, a title or a tag. But the user testing proved me wrong. No one has noticed anything weird out of the 15 users we've spoken to.

This project is a work in progress, so I cannot tell you how successful or unsuccessful it is. But it's been quite a fun ride so far. Yet another example that you cannot just create a feature, put it in your product, and hope that your users will magically start using it. Especially if they came to your product with a different job to be done in mind.

Say hi at agata.ageieva@gmail.com

Say hi at agata.ageieva@gmail.com

Say hi at agata.ageieva@gmail.com