MakeYourMaps
Mobile Travel Guide
MakeYourMaps enables users to become contributors or local guides by allowing them to review/comment on places of interest. The contributors make up a global community of users who post reviews and photos, answer questions, and add or update places. Millions of people rely on their contributions to help them decide where to go and what to do.
Project Overview
Role
Tools
Product Manager
Google slides
Google sheets
Google doc
Google forms
Pen and paper
Objective
Duration
Improve, develop, and prioritize features
3 weeks
Purpose and Context: MakeYourMaps is the first project I created as part of the Product Management course with CareerFoundry. The senior product manager for MakeYourMaps asked me to take a look at the contributor feature on the MakeYourMaps product and come up with a plan to improve a couple of features for contributors. I followed the steps of the Product Management Process to create a low fidelity prototype of MakeYourMaps which I tested on potential users to see how the design could be improved. In the context of this case study a user and a contributor can be considered the same unless stated otherwise.
User Research
I performed qualitative research through user interviews with four contributors to find out what potential contributors value in local guide apps and start developing ideas to improve my product.
Questions asked to contributors:
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What is your main goal when using a local guide app?
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How frequently do you use local guide apps?
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If you’ve used more than one local guide app, which do you prefer and why?
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What are the best features of your local guide app?
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What are the worst features of your local guide app?
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How do these features impact your app usage (e.g., time spent in the app)?
User Comments
“I don’t want results that are far out of my way, first options should be closest to my area.”
“I like to find nearby gas stations when I’m traveling”
“I don’t like that sometimes it takes you the long way instead of the direct route”
“I like to be able to find restaurants in my area”
“Start with the closest results first because the farther ones are irrelevant.”
Key insights: Many of the comments that I heard from users during the interviews reflected frustration in apps like MakeYourMaps giving irrelevant results or taking them an inconvenient route when looking for places of interest and directions.
I prioritized two new feature suggestions based on business, user impact, and user interview results.
Top two recommendations:
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I would suggest that for the local search results, the app forces the local GPS coordinates only for searches and shows the highest rated businesses first.
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I would also suggest that we optimize our keyword search to give the user a more specific result to show exactly what they are looking for.
Key takeaways from this step: Contributors want the search feature to take them the most direct, accurate route possible and they want to be able to easily find places of interest near them.
Validating the Product Improvements
I needed to talk to my users to find out if my product improvements would work for them so to start out I outlined a research goal and then wrote survey and interview questions. I made sure that my questions were aligned with my research goal.
I got some feedback at this point that I should focus more on the “contributor” features which was clarified to mean things like uploading photos, leaving reviews and tagging locations in addition to my other findings from the first round of user interviews (navigation features that were important to users) so I added survey and interview questions to research how to improve these contributor features.
Research Goal
Research Goal: To find out if contributor improvements will improve user experience.
Next, I conducted the interviews and sent out the surveys to six contributors using zoom and Google forms.
Then, I reviewed survey and interview responses to see if my product improvement ideas were validated. Since I focused more in this round of surveys and interviews on what were considered to be contributor features (uploading photos, leaving reviews and tagging locations) I found out some new information. For example, when asked “would you rather get suggestions of places to visit based on previously saved locations or highest rated places of interest near your current location? Or is there another way you’d like to have suggestions be sent to you?" Most users stated that they would prefer to see the highest rated places of interest near their current location.
Prioritization
Next, I prioritized user stories using the MoSCoW approach to prepare for product launch in six weeks and the next sprint.
Wireframes
Next, I created a visual user flow for product improvements in the form of a low-fidelity wireframe for iOS to present to the design team.
Challenges and Learnings
One challenge that I faced was my tutor, mentor and myself misunderstanding what was being asked of me in different tasks. For example, the first task asked for me to improve “contributor features” and there was some confusion as to the difference between a contributor and a user. This taught me the importance of good communication and asking good clarifying questions when a team member or stakeholder has a request to make sure that I’m working to solve the correct problem and to avoid frustration between team members. My original project task was to improve, develop and prioritize contributor features. Going through the product management process of gathering ideas, research and validating my product improvements I was able to come up with a solution to meet business and user needs. In the future, in a real-world situation, I would make sure to:
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Make sure to have good communication including at least weekly check-ins with my team to make sure that all stakeholders are aligned throughout the process.
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Create a prototype prior to launch for further testing or hopefully have a UX team available to me that can assist with this.
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Make sure that proper analytics are setup to measure success metrics and review them to make sure we are meeting business goals.
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Setup a customer feedback loop to get feedback after launch.
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