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00:13 Chris Ronan: Hey there. Welcome to Inside Geocaching HQ, the podcast from Inside Geocaching HQ in Seattle. I am Chris Ronan. My user name is Rock Chalk. I am one of the staff members here at HQ. This week we released a big update to the Geocaching® app. This is what is known as a phased release, meaning that it goes out to around 10% of users to start with and then it ramps up to 100% over the course of a couple of days. Chances are that by the time you hear this, the update will be available to everybody. But if you’re not seeing it just yet, give it a day or so and it will be there in the Apple Store or the Google Store or whatever you use to get your app updates. On this episode, we have Ben Hewitt, who is a senior product manager working with the mobile team. He is here to explain what is new in the app. So let’s get to.

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01:12 CR: Okay. So Ben, we have a new app release that came out this week and it’s pretty exciting. The people, what I’ve seen so far, people are pretty happy with what they’re seeing. So for folks that haven’t seen it, or, I know this is what’s called a staged rollout, and it takes a few days for to matriculate through the stores at the Apple and the Google stores, but what are the big headlines of this release?

01:40 Ben Hewitt: The heart and soul of this release is focused on navigation, and that’s not navigation in the app, but the act of using the app to navigate to a geocache. Anybody who’s been around this game for a long time knows that that primarily used to be a task for a handheld GPS for your Garmin, your Magellan. Now of course we’ve got a lot of people who are using the app to go geocaching, and this is one of the core purposes of the app is to say, “You’re standing at point A, the geocache is at point B. What tools do we need to provide in order to get you from A to B?”

02:14 CR: So for those of us that have played the game for a long time, we feel like we’re very experienced, getting to a cache seems like a pretty easy concept. If I’m using the app, I go to the cache and then I go to my compass or whatever. I mean I’ve got my workflow. But you do a lot of testing with people and players of various experience levels and it isn’t necessarily as easy as some of us may think that it is.

02:40 BH: That’s true. We started off with some pretty good data that it was telling us that not as many people were getting to caches as we hoped they would. That was particularly true of people that were just starting off the game, newer players. I think as advanced players, you and I both know that we’re pretty, we’re adaptive to the workflow. We get used to using the tools at hand to make the job work, and I think if you’re kind of like a map geek at heart like I am, then eventually you just kind of orient yourself in the way that you need to. But what we discovered is that a lot of people really were struggling to understand the tools that we’d given them in the app to navigate.

03:21 BH: There was a little black band on the map that would show kind of a rotating compass and we lovingly called that Grandpa’s compass. It’s a nickname that’s been around the office for years. And when we started testing around this to understand better where people were struggling with navigation, one of the really interesting tells that we had from users is they’d fire up the app. They would hit start to start navigating and then they would start rotating their device or they would contort their bodies in weird ways to kind of try and understand where the cache was.

03:55 BH: And we used to do just a really simple test of saying like, “Can you point to where you think the cache is right now?” And a lot of the time, people had no idea. That’s clearly not a good situation for us to be in where we have given them a tool to navigate to the cache and they can’t even point to where they think the cache is. So that was the beginning of an epic journey to say how do we do better at this. And the interesting thing, like you said, is that for people who have been around this for a long time, some of this, a lot of this is kind of solved problems, and some of the things that we ended up implementing are really similar to what some people will recognize from their handheld Garmin or Magellan GPS units that they’ve had around forever. We kind of returned to some standards there in terms of what people expect when they’re advocating to a geocache.

04:48 CR: So we’ve got this new navigation mode which has you orienting based on the direction you’re facing which is different from the past, and then distance from the cache is right there at the top of the screen, a little bit more accessible there. So those are some of the, maybe some of the more major changes people are going to notice.

05:08 BH: Anybody who’s used a handheld GPS for a while will probably know the difference between track up navigation and north up navigation. In case you don’t, track up navigation means that the top of the screen will always be pointing in your direction of travel, and in north up navigation, north is always pointed up kind of like where most of us are used to looking at a map. Both of those were possible in the previous version of the app, but the more we unpacked people’s words and body language and how they were trying to use the app, we realized that really what they were looking for and they didn’t know it, was track up navigation. And so the new navigation mode defaults into track up navigation. It was something that a lot of users over time had asked us for, but it was just kind of hidden in the old workflow. That said, we know that not everybody prefers track up navigation. People have different mental models. And so there is a lot of apps like Google Maps and ways we added a new setting for navigation that says, “Keep map north up.” So if you’re a north up navigator, you can go into the settings screen and flip that over and then you’ll have north up navigation instead.

06:19 BH: Like you said also about the distance, another big theme that came through as a deficiency in the previous navigation tools is that people wanted more map real estate. People wanted to see more of their surroundings as they were navigating to a cache. So over time, we slowly removed more and more and more from the navigation experience. We removed the bottom tab bar on iOS. We removed the cache summary. We even removed some of the map controls. You can still access them from other places, but basically what we did is we stripped it down to just the core information that you needed to navigate to the geocache, which the end result, it means you have a very focused experience and the chance to see a lot of the map as you’re navigating to the geocache.

07:08 CR: Yeah, I like how if a person wants to stay with north up, they can make that choice for themselves and switch back and forth. In your testing, did you get a sense for how… Did you give people the opportunity during testing to decide which one, and did they choose one or the other?

07:26 BH: We tested with several different cohorts of people. We tested with brand new people who had never seen the app or gone geocaching before. We tested with novice geocachers who had a handful of finds, and then we tested with really advanced geocachers. And what we discovered is defaulting to track up was successful for the vast majority of those people. It wasn’t always… People wouldn’t be able to articulate that that was their preference because I think it’s just not something that people, unless you’re a handheld GPS nerd that you really geek out on that language, track up versus north up. But in the way that they behaved and their success of getting from where we started testing to the geocache location, it was really clear that across different experience levels, that was a great starting point.

08:10 BH: And then of course the exception to that rule is that, like you said, some people just don’t prefer it. Some people’s minds don’t wanna see the map moving in that way. And so we definitely knew that we were gonna need to support people who prefer north up navigation too.

08:29 BH: One of the things that is common around both the track up version and the north up version is that we have what we call an autopilot mode. This was also based on feedback. We’d heard from the community for years and they came up in testing. And so when you hit navigate to a geocache, whether you’re in track up or north up, we start you in this autopilot mode which will automatically frame you in the cache on the map and will automatically zoom in or out as you get closer to hopefully, hopefully not further away from the cache.

[chuckle]

09:03 CR: If you could further away, if you’re zooming out, that’s a problem, right?

[chuckle]

09:07 BH: But it means that you have to do a lot less manual map manipulation as you’re navigating. It’s where we’re trying to take on as much of that as possible ’cause we saw a consistent set of behaviors of people generally wanting to keep their location and the cache location visible on the map and generally wanting to keep zooming in as they got closer and closer. So those things are automatic now. You still have every option to manually adjust that if you want at any time. You can pan the map. You can zoom the map. You can rotate the map however you want, and if you do that, then a little button animates up from the bottom that says, “Center on me.” And if you tap that, then you’re back in what we call autopilot mode.

09:47 CR: I think we’ve talked about this on a previous podcast, but maybe we can just briefly summarize it again. We’ve talked about testing a couple of times. How does that work when you go out and test with… You’re gonna see how they like this feature for instance, navigation. How does that work? Do you just go out? You find some people? You go out to a nearby something here around the office? And then how much do you tell them or not tell them before they start to try to test this thing?

10:17 BH: So that really depends on what we’re trying to accomplish and who the feature is targeted at. We, depending on what goals we’re trying to accomplish with the release, that that will influence who we recruit to do the testing. Generally speaking, what we do nowadays is we build a prototype version of the app. We have awesome developers who will just if we ask them to do A, B, C, and D, they’ll whip out a cool prototype version of it in just a couple days a lot of the time. And so then usually myself and one of our designers will go out and do these interviews with people. We recruit the Facebook ads. We’ve tried a few other things too. Sometimes we recruit on Craigslist or on Google Ads. We try all kinds of things. Generally speaking, Facebook ads have been the most successful for us.

11:08 CR: I saw you holding a sign just down at the corner one day.

11:10 BH: We did.

11:11 CR: That was you?

[chuckle]

11:12 BH: Actually, not a joke. It was. [chuckle] Last week in some of our final testing before pushing this release out, Maurice, our designer for the mobile team and I, we went down to a local Starbucks and then we held up a sign that said, “Do you want free coffee? Test this app for us.” And we call it Gorilla Testing. We just were outside on the corner just trying to get people to use it. The free coffee didn’t work so well, so we ended up starting to pay them 25 bucks.

11:41 CR: If you would’ve, a pastry, I would have gone for that. I don’t know if the coffee would have done it for me.

11:45 BH: Yeah.

11:45 CR: But yeah, if I find next time, I’ll keep an eye out.

11:48 BH: But the key component though, the real important ingredients of getting it right are number one, actually watching people use the app. It’s amazing how much you can learn people. If you give the app to somebody and say, “Give us feedback,” that gives you really good feedback, and then you have to try and understand what they really meant. If you stand there and ask them questions and you watch what they’re doing, you learn so much more through body language, through where they tap, all these ways that you can’t see if they just give you written feedback. And then the other thing we’ve gotten a lot better at in the last year especially is testing functional prototypes. We’ll take the store version of the app and just branch the code and build a prototype really quick and dirty on that so that we can actually go on test a working version with working geocache data with people. We were doing wireframe prototypes or prototypes using other prototyping tools before and those just didn’t do as good of a job as building a functional prototype. So that’s been a really good help for us.

12:55 CR: So before we get into maybe going over a couple of the other new things that are part of this release, why is navigation so important? I mean that sounds dumb as I hear myself say it.

13:06 BH: [13:06] That does sound dumb.

13:07 CR: But I think, “Gosh again. I’m dumb. Gosh Chris” It sounds a little, like I said, it sounds so simple, but it, and especially for somebody like me who’s experienced, I think “Why are we spending time on navigation?” And there’s all these other things I wanna see instead, but because I’m here and because I hear you talk a lot about it, I know how important it is. So why has it been such a primary focus over the last several months really working on this?

13:36 BH: I think the… If I told you, “Hey, we’re building a geocaching app from scratch. What does it need to do for you?

13:43 CR: Find the caches for me.

13:45 BH: Find the caches. [chuckle] Just log them all right now? [chuckle] Give me one button.

13:49 CR: There’s no cache that does that, no app that does.

13:51 BH: That’s what I need. If I just tap this button it will slowly just start logging caches for me. [chuckle] That’s a good app. We should do that.

13:58 CR: Okay, so we’ll work on that next, but before, now what we’re working on though…

14:02 BH: The point is, this is a sneaky thing. It’s not a feature that people think about. But if you think about what you need from a Geocaching app, navigating to geocaches, I would argue is perhaps the very top need, maybe not quite the top, but it depends on who you are. Some people are gonna use the app as a companion to a GPS device. If that’s you, you probably don’t need really good navigation tools in the app. And if you’re using the app by itself to go out geocaching, then this is one of the main things that the app needs to accomplish for you is to get you there. And as I mentioned before, what we discovered is that it was a mistake to consider that a solved problem in the app. We did have tools in the app that would help you navigate to geocaches, but following up on data and following up on lots of interviews, it became really clear that the tools we had were not working in the way that we wanted them to. And so to put it differently, one of our core features, get me to the geocache, was broken.

15:05 CR: So other features that we have in this new release, one of them is new cache preview?

15:11 BH: Mm-hmm.

15:12 CR: And tell us about that a little bit.

15:14 BH: Yeah. So that’s a little nugget of goodness that we just had the opportunity to take in at the same time. If you use the app, you know that if you tap on the cache on the map, it pops up a little preview of the cache that gives you the geocache name, how far away it is, favorite points and so on. In the past, you had to tap all the way into the full geocache details to see the difficulty, terrain, and size. And a lot of players understandably said, “Hey, I wanna see more information on that preview so I can decide whether it’s even a cache that’s even interesting to me.” And so on the new cache preview that replaces the old one, we have added that. We’ve added for the first time difficulty, terrain, and size. This is another one that seems perhaps like a no-brainer to advanced people. I know that it’s something that I’ve wanted for a long time as a player. So it’s great to have a little more information in that preview there.

16:13 CR: Yeah, I think one thing we don’t tell people is mostly your preferences are what we work on first, right?

16:18 BH: Of course.

16:20 CR: There’s something that you want and the rest of us kind of get in line.

16:20 BH: Oh yeah.

16:22 CR: So that’s a…

16:23 BH: That’s exactly how this works.

16:23 CR: So how badly did you want new cache details header? That’s another thing that, [chuckle] that’s the next thing on the list.

[chuckle]

16:31 BH: So that one actually is another one that is a sneaky “when,” not in the 7.0 release that we just shipped this week, but in the very… I think it’ll either be in 7.1 or 7.2, having that new cache details header. And on iOS, if you’ve been using the app for a while, you know that the cache preview, if you tapped it again, would slide up to open the full cache details. That was a cute animation. But one thing that prevented us from doing, because if you pulled on the cache, it would slide it up and down, it meant that we could never do pull-to-refresh on cache details, and I think everybody who’s used a smartphone for a while is pretty acquainted with this, at this point with pulling down to refresh the data on their screen.

17:19 BH: So another thing we’ve heard, particularly from advanced players over time is, “Hey, I’m looking at this cache in the app, and my corrected coordinates aren’t there,” or, “the trackable inventory is out of date,” or, “the cache owner changed the coordinates and I don’t have the latest data.” The thing that we always wanted to do as the quickest resolution to all of that is just add pull-to-refresh, which is go out to the API, get the newest data and show that. That’s the quickest way to rectify any of those inconsistencies. And so now, finally, because we changed all that, we’re adding, we’ll be adding pull-to-refresh on cache details so that people have just a quick way to always get the latest data about that cache.

18:02 CR: Among the other improvements and changes, is getting close to the geocache, that notification. And that has changed a little bit.

18:11 BH: That’s, if you’ve been using this app for a long time, you’ll remember that we’ve changed that quite a bit over the years. When this app was originally introduced, back when we had two apps, there was a very intrusive close-to-cache notification that you couldn’t turn off, and…

18:29 CR: Yeah, I’m still trying to get that out of my head.

[chuckle]

18:32 BH: I know.

18:33 CR: I still have nightmares about it.

18:34 BH: Suffice to say, it was not a favorite for advanced players. There were a lot of players that as we directed more traffic to this app, they were not happy with having that close-to-cache screen which they couldn’t turn off. So over time, we’ve changed that quite a bit. First, we changed it so that you had the opportunity to turn it off. And a lot of people did. We still know, particularly for new players, that there’s a key moment where as you’re learning the game, we need to tell you, “Hey, it’s time to put down the GPS and start looking ’cause this is about as close as you’re gonna get.” But now we’ve switched to doing that in a much more subtle way, which is just to vibrate when you’re close to the geocache, and that’s subject to further changes over time. We may consider giving people more options to have a sound or a visual aid if they want, but for now it’s just we’ve kind of started over and dialed it back to a very subtle close-to-cache which is just the vibration.

19:30 CR: So your team has been working on this release for quite a while and working on these improvements that are in this release. How do you decide what’s next or what features are next and where do I send my list of things that I want you to add?

19:48 BH: Well I see a garbage can in the corner. Those, you can file yours over there.

19:52 CR: Oh, that’s so harsh. Gosh, you could at least made me feel like my feedback was valued, but apparently that’s fine. That’s fine. Don’t worry about it. I’m used to this.

20:02 BH: Well, well, for everybody, for all of our beloved listeners, here’s the truth. We are constantly listening to feedback from the community. We get that through all kinds of different mechanisms. We get that through these interviews and testing that we do. We get that from the forums, from email, from all the ways that people keep in touch with us. All of that feedback from the community is a big part of what the leadership here uses to create goals each year for the next year. Bryan and the rest of the management team have currently been working on getting the goals for 2019 set. Again, the community feedback is a big input to that, and then the mobile team and other teams will be tasked with making progress against those goals for 2019. So we’re just starting that process right now and that will kick off a whole another round of research and interviews and prototyping and testing and cool new stuff to come in the spring.

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21:01 CR: That was Ben Hewitt telling us everything we need to know about the latest version of the Geocaching® app. Visit the Geocaching blog for even more information about the app update. You can find that at blog.geocaching.com. If there’s a geocaching topic you would like to hear more about, tell us about it. Just send us an email to podcast@geocaching.com. Once again, that is podcast@geocaching.com. We always appreciate your suggestions. Thanks for listening. From all of us at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.