FishingTheSpot
Project
Roles
Duration
- Mobile App
- Research
- Product Design
- Front-end
- 4 months
A mobile app to get anglers
the best fishing experience through
technology, localized data and community.
Context
At the beginning of 2021, FishingTheSpot's team grew and we decided to build a new version of the mobile app.
The old version had usability, design and technical issues, and seemed really out of date.
Problems
Users were not very active and user retention was quite low. Posting catches and other content was uneasy and unappealing, leading to an empty feed.
The type of content you could share depended of the page the user was on, causing unnecessary friction. There was too much information and data to process, with no filters enabled and no way to search for specific content.
Overall, the app was complex and empty at the same time.
Team & Role
Building a new app required a team of 3 back-end developers, a front-end dev and me as product designer, also helping out on the development.
As the sole designer, I oversaw the entire design of the product from initial ideas to development including: research, ideation with other stakeholders, information architecture, user flows, UI Design and development.
Results
Conversion rate
5x
Retention rate
+22%
Daily active users
7x
Fishing trips
12x
Catches/user
+280%
Design process
To decide if this projects was necessary, I started by accessing the state of the old application. To do this, I used different methods such as heuristic evaluation, surveys, user interviews, and used data we had from previous usage.
The results were very clear, users felt frustrated and some even deceived by the app. A lot of them didn't know or understand what they could do with it. I did a competitive analysis and identified possible features we were lacking.
I then used the results to ideate with a selected group of people including expert and beginner anglers, developers working on the project and more.
We decided divided the app development by feature as follow.
Login & account creation
When opening the app for the first time, users arrive on the account creation screen.
After a survey, we decided to enable Facebook, Google and email to create an account as those are the most used ways for our users.
User onboarding
Once the user creates a new account, he is redirected to the onboarding. He's asked for crucial data, such as pseudo, fishing level and city. Then he's presented with some of the core features of the app.
The onboarding ends with a call to action to post a catch, which will unlock additionnal features.
Location, location, location
Almost all of our content and data is location dependent. To improve upon the old app, one of the key components that was missing was a simple and universal way to handle location.
After some tests, we figured the best way to handle location was to have a page dedicated to it, accessible from every page of the app.
Users can search for specific cities, add and remove them from their favorites or use their current GPS position.
Catch list
We decided to use the catch list as a home page because it holds the biggest discovery and social aspects in the app.
Users can see the catches of other anglers, details about them and interact with actions such as like, share and comment.
Save a catch
This action being the most used by our users, we tried lots of options and finally chose a clean step by step flow to save a catch.
We added a way for users to save their catch as a draft at any point in the process to prevent mishandling of the fish and to allow users to continue fishing while using the app.
To keep control and privacy about the spots they fish at, users can set the GPS coordinates to private mode.
Fishing trips
Users can contact other anglers who want to find someone to accompany them fishing, on foot or by boat.
Notifications & messagerie
Various actions trigger notifications such as: catch or fishing trip posted in a favorite city, fishing index higher than the threshold chosen by the user etc.
Users can also chat to share experiences, tips and plan a fishing trip.
Post a fishing trip
Users can post fishing trips to find other anglers to go fishing with. This flow is also a step by step, with one question or subject by page to prevent cognitive load and apparent complexity.
After a few tests, we decided to add a list of potential answers at the top of the page.
At the end of the process, users can check and go back to a previous step if they need to before publishing.
Discover new places
This is one of the core features of the app: where users discover new spots to go fishing at.
Users can change location by using the feature on the top of the page or just by moving the map. When they click on a pin of the map, they can see the corresponding card at the top of the screen, showing limited information about the spot: spot type, fishes found there, and the spot's name if it has one.
Users can have more information about the spot by clicking on the button - including pictures, meteorological data, coordinates & more to help them make an informed decision.
Discover other points of interest
Users can also find fishing shops, guides and private lakes to go fishing at. Those points of interest are created and handled by the concerned professionals themselves.
Save a spot
This feature was requested by many of the users I interviewed: a simple way to save their favorite spots.
Users can also select the species found there and share the corresponding coordinates or keep them private.
Previsions
To help users decide when and where to go fishing, we created an algorithm that gives a score from 0 to 10 to each 5-minutes portions of a day, using several meteorological data points.
We then divided the score in four categories from low to high and deduced if the time is good for fishing, for our users.
We also display the minimum and maximum value of each data point for each day.
Articles
We created a "magazine", bundling several articles, to give anglers access to information about various species, techniques and news about the fishing universe.
Contests
We developed a new way to do fishing contests, by eliminating the location aspect of it via the use of an AI to determine fishes sizes.
Doing so, we were able to create the biggest fishing contests in Europe with hundreds of contestants. Since then we expanded this feature to partners to help them provide fishing tournaments to their customers.
Profile
The profile is home of the users content. They can find all of their catches, fishing trips, spots and more.
We also added fishing statistics to help them keep their fishing archives and track their achievements. Statistics include most fished species, biggest catch, average catch size and their ranking among other anglers on the app.
Account and parameters
Users can modify their profile information and application preferences on this page. Including notification threshold, list mode or gallery mode, dark theme and more.
Search
We created a centralized search, with recommendations and filterable results by type of content. This helps users get more freedom and quickly find an angler, news, species guides and more.
Premium membership
The app uses a freemium model meaning some of the data and features lie behind a paywall.
We tested a lot of call to actions, pricing and feature locking to determine what had to be premium only while being permissive enough to retain free users on the app.
Our solution was to create a contextual modal that shows when users try to do something only premium users can do. We also created banners appearing on strategic locations of the app to get higher conversion rates.
