Research Methods and Planning

Usage and Revenue Potential of Location-Sharing Apps

Location-sharing apps like Find My, Life360, and Snapchat Map are widely used in the U.S., with Gen Z leading adoption, and while direct public revenue figures are limited, the market is growing fast and monetization is expanding.

How Many People Use These Apps

• Overall U.S. usage: About 62% of Americans share their location with others, with younger generations far more likely to do so All About Cookies.

• Gen Z dominance: Gen Z (18–29) is the most active group, with 75% enabling location sharing on their phones All About Cookies. CivicScience data show 65% of Gen Z adults share with at least one person, and many share with multiple others — some with dozens or even hundreds
  

• In depth Competitive analysis - First I did an in- depth competitive analysis between its competitors, which includes

• Find My Friends,

• Life 360,

• Airtag

• Crowd Compass. Most operate using your phone but Crowd Compass does not, it uses its own special device. I found out Crowd Compass does not really have too many competitors but I wanted to make something similar that would not have to rely on a separate device and just use your phone.

• Most location sharing apps do not offer a week time period of sharing, it's usually all or nothing and I wanted to create a middle ground for people who want to stay in touch during an event but do not need everyone to see their day to day location. Find my Friends is an great app but only works for Apple so it would be nice to have an App that works with android as well. VIEW SWOT HERE
  

• Participant recruitment - Then I worked on finding participants by sending out a survey about location sharing and used that to find participants willing to do some interviews about the subject and their experiences. I was able to get 9 participants for the survey and that helped me narrow down who I wanted to Interview. There ages were ranged 25-40 were currently using these applications in the market.

• Interview Questions - I started to work on what questions I wanted to ask them and I worked on a survey to send out to people to get some data about location sharing apps.

Conducting Research

I found that creating a quick survey for people is a great way to collect lots of field data, get participants interested in the project and was also a great way to vet who would be willing to do interviews about the subject.

This is some of the insight I was able to get from the survey I sent out and I made a section at the bottom for people to add their information if they were willing to do an interview. That was something new I added but I truly enjoyed how easy it made it to find interviewees. I was able to conclude from my interviews that quite a few people were very interested in the idea of my app and would love to be able to use it in the future. This made me very excited because I feel like this could truly become a very beneficial app in the future

Here is the Survey to send out to 9 people to get instant data. VIEW SURVEY RESULTS HERE

Interview Questions - I started to work on what questions I wanted to ask them about the frustrations and friction points associated with trying to find friends during an large public event and how they go through the process of finding friends themselves and then I scheduled each of the 5 interviews. The full interview guide is here MY INTERVIEW GUIDE

Research Synthesis

After my interviews were done I sat down and relistened to each interview again and went over all the notes and made an AFFINITY MAP. I started to piece together the common themes throughout each interview.

I found that most people do rely on basic calling and messaging to find people during a crowded event. Some end up giving up if it's too challenging and most people felt like having an app like this would be very beneficial and a lot of them said they would love to use it outside of the festival realm as well.

Although some participants expressed a concern about battery life or privacy breaches, I believe most would not want to pay a monthly subscription for the service unless it provided more benefits like that “Im Lost” button or if it did some kind of collaboration with each festival event. 

One participant even mentioned having it pair with your smart watch to track your heart rate and alert medical if you need assistance.

Persona - After I found the common themes I created a persona to match the needs and wants of my targeted audience 

I created Maya Rue who wants a easy way to keep up with all her friends at a festival but does not want them to have access to her location after the event so her privacy and home location are kept safe.

Prioritization

Next I utilized the information found in my interviews to focused on figuring out what features needed to be top priority when it comes to building out this app. I decided focusing on making a solid location sharing map was more important than making sure every feature that was expressed during my interviews made their way into the first version of the app, I decided the IM Lost and SOS part could wait til later along with the smart watch pairing.

Project goals - I worked out the business and personal goals I wanted for the App

Problem Statement -  Using the research from my participants I created some problem statements for my persona. They are Listed below.

My problem statements were made to embody the users and their needs as they navigate through the app.

Maya needs a way to share live locations with her group of 8 friends during a weekend festival so that she can stop being the group's human GPS.

Maya needs an efficient  way to share her location in the festival grounds  so she can explore independently but always still be able to see her friends' locations, for easier meet ups. 

Feature Set - Then I came up with the priority ranking of the features I wanted to add to this App. 

Affinity Map Groupings

UI Interaction

• High Fidelity Mock ups - After creating the Brand I was ready to tackle the High Fidelity figma files 

• Usability test plan and results - Then I found 5 more participants to test my high fidelity prototype on 

After fixing a few bugs my participants told me about even though they were able to complete the task like screens not going to the right one and also adding things like a back button at the top so its easy to navigate back to where you were. I added more pages to the map settings so you can draw or make your location ring a set radius.

• Iterations - After the feedback for all my users I was able to make a few more corrections to end up with the final version of my app. 

I flushed out all my Mid Fid frames and added color and font style and put my logo on all the screens. My colors were favoring cool tones so I decided to switch it up a little and add some warm tones and put more of the orange color I had through the file. I added some rings around each friend you are trying to find that are color coded to match if they are ‘In Orbit' or 'Out of Orbit' for easier detection. I made sure there was an event page and the Map boundaries section was clear and easy to figure out how to navigate around 

Map Boundary EDIT Page

Handoff

• Final HIGH FID- The last step was to use all my feedback to make the final iterations and create my polished Location Sharing App, Orbit. 

• UI Kit - Finally I made a kit of all the fonts, Call to Action buttons and Icons I used throughout my design. 

After fixing a few things in my figma file I did a final prototype myself of the new frames I added to make sure it all works correctly and was very pleased with the results. I truly had a wonderful time creating this from start to finish and being able to be in complete control of my design and ultimate idea for this Location Sharing App. I would love to be able to continue to work on building this out to a fully developed App in the near future.

MY UI KIT

Testing and Iterations

• Low Fi - I needed to make a sketch version of my app to start to figure out how I was going to build it out. I breifly made some sketches of how the app would look

• Mid Fi - Once that was complete I worked on creating it in figma so I could start to prototype the user flow and find any bugs or things I needed to fix before I moved on to a Higher Fidelity version 

• User testing - I started off with 3 people who tested out my Mid version and gave me some good feedback. I wanted them to make sure all the buttons navigated to the correct page and the flow was easy to use. 

  Once I finally got the prototype to start working, it was having difficulty navigating from one screen to the next, it was trying to scroll to them and that was not my intention. 

  After this I was able to realise the placement of the Orbits logo was being cut off so I needed to change the location of the logo. 

  
  

  After that  I prototype tested it on a few friends. 

  The first person could not actually get the screen to move from one to another so worked on fixing that

  After I fixed that I had another friend test it out and their feedback was that 

  Some of the icons and buttons are not consistent on each page and the first pages do not actually show any text of what is going on; so those things need to be redone. 

  
  The third person who tested it mentioned there was no back button or way to move back to the previous screen and some of the lines were not clickable. They could not understand why the map button wasn't working but they were in the map already so maybe that button needs to be removed from that screen.
  

My MID testing revealed that some icons were not showing up and some pages ended up making a few people get stuck in an area and were not able to complete the flow. I used their feedback to end up fixing some icons and where some buttons were located. I also added a back button to every page because that was missing as well.   

LINK TO FIGMA PROTOTYPE

Branding

• Moodboard - I created a moodboard to show the type of color scheme and vibe I wanted the app to represent. I wanted a cool color tone throughout the app

I wanted to create a cool color theme for the app and stick to a space like theme over all. I like the idea of a dark theme app because it goes with the space theme as well.

• Brand Style Title - Next I worked out creating a brand name and flushing out the style title to make it all come together. 

  I was having a hard time trying to come up with a name for the app that would not limit it to only being used in a festival setting. The first name I came up with was Festie Finder but I was afraid that would limit its ability to be used in any other setting and I did not want to do that. After some deep thought I came up with Orbit. You orbit around your friends but do not need to be right next to them all the time which I felt was exactly the vibe I wanted to represent. Then I really started to create a whole universe for this App. With friends being “in Orbit’ or “out of Orbit’ and I really felt like it was very clever and something I could see in the App store.

• Logo - The last step was creating a Logo and finally deciding on a name. 

I created a Logo with a space theme but made the planet's people icons so you understand that they are all sharing locations together and I really like the logo I created. I feel like you can get a feel for the App by just looking at the logo and that important to me

User Flows

Main Map Page

Before and After

My Events Page

Before and After

I added text to show what the color coded rings around each friend means so there is less confusion

Information Architecture and Flows

• Site Map - I started to work on how to navigate through the app

• User Flow - for the user flow the two important task will be setting the map boundary and adding friends  

After I figured out the goals for my app and which features I wanted to work on first, I started to create a Site Map to show the way you should navigate through the app so I decided I wanted to work on making an event in the app. I made another flow for finding friends and inviting them to the app.

After that I decided it was most important to focus on creating a flow for how to set the map boundaries since that is a unique feature I have not seen in any other app so far. I decided to make this my primary focus when building out my Low, Mid and High Fidelity versions since it has not been used in other Apps before. 

Site Map