By: Becky Harris
Over two days at Locate, consumer apps and brands showcased how they’re using location tech to better engage and retain users. Pinning user data to a map gives users a nontraditional way to browse and discover content — just take a look at Snap Map. Some apps have taken it further, using a customized map as their primary product interface.
With over fifty panels, and 100+ speakers, three larger themes seemed to dominate B2C-focused conversation.
1) Brands are breaking user expectations by customizing maps
We all know what to expect when we look at a map — blue represents water, parks are green, and red pins show you where you need to go. However, developers are finding success when they break these consumer expectations and play with customization and design to differentiate their apps from the competition.
Lonely Planet, a company with a 40-year history, translated their colorful brand identity and iconography from printed travel guides into digital maps, ensuring consistency across their product portfolio. Aaron London, Head of iOS Development, explained that this consistency provides a seamless user experience as people switch between Lonely Planet’s print guides, websites, and mobile apps while traveling.
The festival and events app, Woov, takes map customization to a whole new level. Woov builds one-of-a-kind festival maps to engage festival-goers, helping them navigate a festival’s key stages and keep track of their friends.
The experience we build in maps has to match the experience music festivals build for their attendees. That’s why we invest so heavily in map customization — Sebastian Westerduin, Founder of Woov
You can see that customization at work in the creative icons and fun animations in Woov’s bespoke maps.
2) Data visualization layers show users how they fit into the larger community
Brands and apps are leveraging data visualization to help users understand how they relate to a larger user network.
The fitness app, Strava, layered their global data set of anonymized biking, swimming, and running route data right onto map tiles. With this global telemetry heatmap, users can zoom and pan around the expansive map to discover routes in their immediate area and across the globe.
While Strava’s heat map lets users explore data across a global user-base, Ancestry DNA uses visualization layers to provide a personalized experience for each customer. The team at Ancestry layered customized polygons and flow lines onto their maps to demonstrate the gene migration patterns for a given user’s DNA.
3) Maps and AR are driving action in the real world
Brands are building challenges into their apps that get users to explore their physical surroundings.
For example, during the lead-up to Easter 2018, Snap integrated a geocaching game into Snap Map to get users to interact with the world around them. To play, users looked to the map to guide them to “easter eggs” that were hidden at various stores and landmarks. As players neared their desired location, a simple AR mask revealed a hidden egg to collect.
Rever — the app that lets the motorcycling community record and navigate planned rides — creates challenges in their app to incentivize riders to get outside. For the Honda Pass Bagger Challenge, Rever challenged riders to visit as many of America’s mountain passes as they could. Over the course of the challenge, 2,400 riders completed 32,500 rides, hitting 2,600 locations.
Custom maps, data visualization layers, and app-enabled experiences like these help companies drive repeat engagement and build brand loyalty.
To make your app stand out and engage users, drop us a line, or check out our mapping and location data tools for B2C apps and brands.
Exploring the edges of consumer-facing apps was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.