New Feature: Maps
Today we rolled out another one of our most requested features: Maps! But rather than bore you with a bunch of words, we’ll tell you about it BuzzFeed-style.
At first we we like…
Then we were like…
So we asked our boss…
And then we were like…
And now we’re like…
The wordier version
Maps is another one of our most requested features. Austin is growing at a pace of 150 people per day, so it’s not a shock that people (especially newcomers) are unfamiliar with the locations and town names around Austin. They all end in “–burg” or “–ville” and are pronounced differently than how they’re spelled.
It seems obvious that a geolocation-based application like DayTrip should have a map. Geolocation = Map! Duh! Yet, as we started to sketch and build out the feature, we noticed that maps are actually a terrible way to find things. From a UX perspective, it’s a lot of hunt-and-pecking around a mystery-meat navigation of location pin icons to hopefully find something that interests you. Maps tend to work better with a smaller, digestible, set of options.
A map of all the spots on DayTrip wasn’t the solution. A map of all the spots in a town wasn’t really the solution either. The feature wasn’t really working until we tried it with Towns.
Browsing towns in a map view is fairly intuitive and helpful. It helps makes sense of where destinations are in relation to one another.
And since towns are essentially a collection of spots, we can guarantee that you’ll be able to spend a full day out and about. We think you’ll really like how it turned out.
If have strong feels about our town map, let us know, we’d love your feedback.