Engagement and Gamification on WolfPack

WolfPack, a group motorcycle tourism and navigation app, sought to increase user engagement by encouraging community and adventure on top of their mainly utility-based tool.

IntroducingWP.png

  • Project Dates

    January 2021 - Present

  • My Roles

    Lead User Researcher

    Lead Product Designer

  • The Team

    Product Manager

    Front-End Developer

    Back-End Developer

    QA Engineer

Overview

Project Background

WolfPack is an existing app that was created in 2016 and used to form motorcycle groups, create and share rides, and provide on-route navigation. Their navigation is unique with the ability to see those in your group on a radar view and communicate safely while riding. This is all in effort to improve the group riding experience and prevent riders from losing one another on the road, a common frustration.

Our Goal

Up until 2021, the main development focus has been around groups and the on-the-road experience. I was tasked with increasing user engagement through a social feed and gamification elements to build upon the existing feature set and take WolfPack from a strictly utilitarian application to a community focused one. Our goal is to create a positive online motorcycle riding community, encourage riders to get out on their bike more often, meet other riders, and share their riding experiences.

The Challenge

By nature, WolfPack is a seasonal app with motorcyclists typically riding from April to November in North America. This results in many users removing the app during the off season. How might we encourage users to stay engaged in the motorcycle community during the winter months?

 

User’s Needs

At its core, WolfPack was designed to prevent riders from losing each other during the ride. Through speaking with users, that may be their main pain point but it is not their only pain point. Many riders are looking for new people to ride with, ideas on where to ride, and a stronger tie to other riders. Some join formal MCs (motorcycle clubs) and others try to find a casual group of friends to ride with.

Constraints

We have one mobile developer on the team, doing both the Android and iOS development. To simplify and streamline our work, we have one design for both Android and iOS and tend to follow Google’s Material Design Guidelines more as our user base weighs heavily toward Android devices. This includes incorporating a Floating Action Button on the Feed and in other places on the app.

The Research

To understand the market, I researched some of WolfPack’s motorcycle app competitors, as well as comparators such as Strava and mainstream social media apps to evaluate how they are achieving user engagement, gamification, and community building. I also interviewed 6 motorcycle riders, from tour guides to casual riders, to learn more about their personal motivations in regards to riding. Lastly, to fully understand our user base, I spoke with WolfPack’s CEO and product manager who have been working with the user base for 6+ years, to incorporate understandings they have come across.

Key Insights Derived:

  • Two personas emerged, with different needs:

    • The route planner/road captain: Likes to test out their route alone before sharing it with the group, would like new ideas for scenic and twisty routes, run navigation during the ride, and leads the rest of their group

    • The follower: Tends to not run navigation during the ride, focuses on staying close to the group on the ride, and cares more about the scenery and experience

  • Users want to encourage more regulars in their riding group

  • Users are looking for new people to ride with, as long as they are safe riders in a group setting

  • Users are concerned about online safety and tend to be more private with those they do not know

The Solution

 

Social Feed

Share posts with text, images, and your recent rides to your friends, to foster community. To protect your online safety, only your friends will see your posts. We purposely do not display the number of likes on a post as this has been linked to lowering self esteem and we want to remain a positive app.

As this is a brand new feature, I was eager to design the smaller details as well such as how to introduce the feed and prevent an empty feed, what happens while content is loading, the ability to add friend’s of friends, the ability to mute others or delete your own post, and how to get back to the top.

 

Notifications

Find a centralized location for all in-app notifications including friend requests, information about your friends’ interactions with your posts, and run invitations with the ability to RSVP directly from this screen. Unread notifications are denoted with a blue highlight.

 

Friends List and Adding Friends

Connect with individual friends in addition to groups, dictating the content in your social feed. Find friends within WolfPack by location (if enabled) or via your contacts to find nearby riders to meet IRL.

 

Challenges and Badges

Try something new by participating in an upcoming challenge. Explore popular routes, special events, and meet other riders. Earn and collect badges for completing challenges.

Moving Forward

Analytics and Measuring Engagement

Over the next few months, we plan to measure the amount and type of interactions users are completing on the social feed (posting, liking, commenting), adding friends, and the number of people joining challenges. 

Design Next Steps

Going forward, I plan to expand the social feed to include additional content that is of interest to our users, such as upcoming challenges and events, featured scenic and twisty routes, motorcycle product marketing, and more. I also will be conducting tree testing and card sorting studies to assess our current information architecture and make sure our vast feature set is discoverable.

Reflections

This was my first “real” project, with my past projects completed during my time as a student. Being in a start-up environment is quite different from a methodical school approach to design. While design thinking is just as relevant and important, there isn’t enough time to go through all the design steps we had practiced in class. It felt wrong to be skipping over steps such as user testing. I’ve come to learn that Startup UX is quite different from UX Design at a larger company - time and budget is very limited and we must apply the Lean method. Design, Build, Measure rather than Design, Test, Iterate, Test, Iterate, Build. Startup UX requires acting on assumptions, and iterating later once we get feedback and analytics.

As the first designer on the team, I am encouraging more user research before and during design. I started efforts to recruit participants for research studies and was pleasantly surprised by the number of responses. My CEO bet me that if we got more than 5, he would buy me lunch. I’m proud to say we have 174 responses and counting.