Case study -Add a feature to Komoot

I was so excited when I got this chance to work on Komoot. Not because the wanderings I had with it, but the idea behind. Komoot literally kicked “the lazy me” out of my cozy sofa and showed the green shadows of Berlin.

Komoot

Komoot is an app that lets you find, plan, and share adventures such as treks, hikes, cycle rides and so on with an easy route planner. Komoot currently has 17 million users

Mission : Change the Way People Explore

The feature

The feature to add into Komoot is to add a provision to draw a route on map. This can give user more control on the route they wanted to cover.

My thoughts at first was — Does user really needs such a feature?. All in all I love Komoot as the way it is. However I gave it a chance to contextualize how other Komoot fans think about this.

Voice of outdoor freaks — user research

To avoid bias, the feature should not be revealed to the user. We conducted a survey to see how user behaves currently and how much they will appreciate the new feature without letting the cat out of the bag.

• 70% of the users like to try new routes every time
• 67 % has faced difficulty in finding their best routes
• 76% trust in Apps/Maps to plan their trips
• 80% of the users likes to improvise their routes

[Sadly I had to admit that I am not in this user spectrum :D ]

The users we interviewed,[including 2 Komoot fans] , are satisfied with current experience. But on talking more, I found most of them have an exploring mindset. They love to explore new routes and places. Even sometimes they do]n’t like Komoot’s suggestions.

Persona and User Journey

We managed to comprehend the users into ‘Bella’, who is an outdoor freak and nature lover. Even if she is a Komoot fan, she doesn’t like to stick only on Komoot suggestions.

We mapped current user frustrations in a journey map, to visually empathize and mapping their pain points.

Competitor Analysis

We used app stores as main source to gather information about competitor apps. Major competitors of Komoot are Strava, Enduco and NRC like fitness apps. Most of Komoot users are also Strava fans. Enduco is relatively new in market but has the draw in map feature. Even apps like Just draw it and Footpath has the draw feature, they fail to address the technical glitches. We could see lot of critic comments about the feature in app store. Though Kommoot doesn’t have lot of features, it still has a good market share.

Jobs to be done

“When we buy a product, we essentially ‘hire’ it to help us do a job. If it does the job well, the next time we’re confronted with the same job, we tend to hire that product again. If it does a crummy job, we ‘fire’ it.”

JTBD has proved to be a useful framework for digital product companies when personas fail to address specific user needs. JTBD framework is useful to center the attention in users motivation and desired outcome.

1. What product / service will you be designing for?

• draw map limitation feature for an already existing app called Kamoot

2. What goals was this product/service designed to achieve?

• Aims at offering more options to the user if we wishes too remain in one area
• Offering the user the possibility to focus on one area in particular.

3. Based on your research which user’s goals/needs that currently not being met?

• Other famous and commonly used hiking/biking/ running apps fails or do not perfectly implement this feature.

4. For each unmet user goal, list the negative effects it has on the product.

• the main negative effect as of now is not offering enough control on the user’s destination.
• Following the results of the survey we can see that most users like to improvise, either they do so without any prior knowledge of where they intend to go or they improvise based a track they are on or a friends’ recommendation.
• Some are disappointed that they have to rely on other people’s treks.

The Objective and Hypothesis

Finding out if we can enhance the experience of Komoot users by adding a ‘draw on the map’ option to give more control on the route they want to travel. From the research we need to decide if it a worthwhile addition to the app.

We believe that by providing the possibility for the user to draw on the map the area he wants to explore, Komoot users they will achieve a higher degree of satisfaction and improvisation as it will enable them to discover/improvise more.

Ideation

We started thinking about how to bring this into play. We checked similar apps and listed the sub features, from user research we got an idea of user needs. And in app reviews, we observed the inconveniences faced by the user in using the feature.

We have concluded to use the following sub features :

1. Draw with Finger / Pensil control
2. Eraser
3. Delete
4. Undo/Redo
5. A feature tutorial for new users

Information Architecture

It is quite a challenge to include a new feature into an app without disturbing the current app flow. And it is important to embrace the base aesthetics.

First, we defined a user flow.

Time for Low-fi Prototyping

The initial sketching of the screens followed by use cases gave us more control to proceed.

Mid-fying and Concept testing

The results from maze encouraged us to try Hi-fis.

Atomizing and Building a design system

We started atomizing the Komoot screens and started building molecules and organisms. We got a practice field to play with components and variants. Even though was quite an exhausting job, this heavily helped us in building final screens. We could realize that the app is not following any grid system, such as 8 point or 12 point.

To the final goal — Hi-fi prototype

Hi-fi should have closest resemblance to the final design in terms of details and functionality. The screens should be consistent in terms of its design .We could almost mimic the screens and could bring a seamless flow in using the feature. When designing Hi-fi, we had time to add a pencil control as well to add more precision while drawing.

Learnings

The main takeaway in this project was the introduction of design system. As a developer, I could closely relate the process of atomic design. I got the point of having a design system in project and the need of modularizing and organizing the design elements, to build better , reusable and scalable products. It is exactly as Alex Schleifeb [Airbnl] said “You can’t innovate on products without first innovating the way you build them.”