(link to podcast)

0:00:13.2 Chris: Hello everybody. This is Inside Geocaching HQ, the podcast where we talk about what is happening at HQ in Seattle. I am Chris Ronan. My geocaching username is Rock Chalk. I’m one of the 90 or so lackeys who works at HQ. I want to start by saying thank you for all the nice feedback that we have received about our podcast, especially going back to the geocaching 20th anniversary celebration here in Seattle, where I had the privilege of meeting so many of you in person, and then also got to attend some big events in Europe during the last half of the year, and got to chat with a lot of you about the podcast. Thank you for those comments. Hopefully, we will pump out more episodes in 2023. Today, I’d like to share a conversation with Jessica Randall, who is a senior product designer at HQ. Jessica spearheaded the HQ product team’s research efforts at the 20th anniversary celebration and is just generally very involved with the design and the function of the tools that we use to go geocaching, especially the tools that you find on the geocaching.com website. I learned a lot about what she does during our chat. It’s very interesting stuff. Here is me and Jessica talking about research and design.

0:01:28.9 Chris: Well, before we hit record, I’m going to bring it up again because I thought it was hilarious where you were talking about the interface on your computer has changed or something about one of the programs has changed and how it was so frustrating that the way that it looks is totally different. But that’s what you do. That is your job at HQ is to help decide how things are going to look and make them better and occasionally make changes. When people shake their fist at their computer and say, why did they change it? It was so great the way it was before, it should never change. It should always be the same. You’re one of the ones that is helping to make those decisions. And as you just told me, you know why those changes are made, but even for you, it can be a little bit frustrating sometimes.

0:02:29.8 Jessica: Yes, all the time. Usually. Yeah. I always feel kind of bad for whenever I do have those moments of frustration of like, why did they update it? And I’m like, yeah, there’s a reason. And sometimes it’ll take a while because, you know, change is hard. And like you said, I do this for a job and I understand it, but yeah, change is hard because you get into those mental models of just where things are. People don’t realize that eventually you don’t really think about it. It’s just sort of your, yeah, it’s a mental, your brain muscle that has been created and you just kind of go. So yeah. So when things change, it’s kind of like, oh, why? Like for example, it was the system settings in my Mac OS that changed. It used to all be icon based and now it seems to be list based. And so I haven’t, I just got introduced to it. So I haven’t played around to understand the exact reason of why I’m guessing less clicks.

0:03:29.8 Jessica: And eventually it will be so ingrained in you that when it changes again someday, you’ll say, wait, they changed it. Why did they change? Exactly. Yeah. It’s always the way that products kind of go is they’re always changing. And so yeah.

0:03:47.9 Chris: Well, before we get any more into it, I haven’t said your name yet, Jessica, and I will say it in the intro that I’ll record before this, but, uh, let’s, let’s just first start with what’s your title at HQ and what does your title mean at HQ?

0:04:01.3 Jessica: I’m a senior product designer, part of the product team. I work primarily on the website. So geocaching.com and what I do is I help support two dev pods, uh, team one and team SOS. And I work with them to come up with features for the web, um, either enhancing them, changing them or just greenfield projects. I work very closely with our product managers for those two teams, specifically, uh, Sven and Pooja. I help research and do discovery on those kinds of features and really get to understand the users.

0:04:44.1 Chris: And so for, and so for people that might not be familiar with the structure at HQ, I think we’ve talked about it in past podcasts with, with other people, but you mentioned dev pods. What is it? What is a dev pod? I mean, and you don’t have to go into each person’s role or, or anything, but it’s, it’s various technical skills, correct? And as you mentioned, you’re primarily working on the website of things. And then I assume there’s also a designer who’s working on the mobile side of things as well.

0:05:15.0 Jessica: Yeah. So developer or engineer pods usually consist of just maybe a handful of engineers, front end and backend and a QA person to help kind of whenever we’re doing releases, a product manager is usually assigned to one developer pod and they kind of just work with them on that certain platform. And then yes, we have a designer on our mobile team and we have a designer specifically for adventure lab, um, developer pod. And we just kind of work primarily with them. That helps kind of keep our mindset into the platform that we are in charge of. As far as design wise, um, we help of course, the designers, uh.

0:06:02.1 Jessica: We are, we talk to each other throughout the process and kind of help each other in our different sort of platforms.

0:06:10.1 Chris: One of the reasons that I wanted to talk to you and there were a lot of them, but back when we had the 20th anniversary celebration here in Seattle, back in August, there was a booth at the celebration where you and some other folks from the product team were asking questions. So that, that just made me think that it would be fun to talk about research and how the product team uses research in developing new products and new tools and all of that stuff. So when I first came here, I think that my thoughts about research or tools at HQ with the website or the app as a player, because I was a player before I came here was I would have assumed that HQ builds something, whether it’s a website tool or an app tool, and then they test it. They go out and just ask people what they think of it, and then they change some things or not. And then they release it to everybody. And then I got here and I found out that’s not exactly the way that it works. There’s quite a bit that goes into it before you even think about building something.

0:07:15.0 Chris: The research of it, though, where does it start? But before we get into all the methods, like when do you start thinking about research and what you’re going to be trying to learn from the people that are part of that research process?

0:07:27.0 Jessica: So that’s a great question. I would say it’s happening every day. We’re always thinking about what to research, but really when we get an idea from a product manager saying, hey, we have this idea for a new feature or this new additional detail on the website, then that goes into kind of research mode right from the get-go as far as discovering. So we are the people that are going to ask all the questions. So who is this for? Why are we showing it? What will our community get out of showing this or adding this feature? And so then we work with the business to kind of define what their thoughts are. So who is our user base? Is this new users? Is this existing user? Is this for everybody? Usually when they say everybody, we will try to get them to pinpoint that more down because it’s hard to build for everybody. That’s when we start scouring. I go through forums, I go through our social media feeds and kind of start generating the community feedback as far as what that specific maybe feature that we’re talking about. If it’s a greenfield project, we will look into which is something completely brand new that maybe we haven’t done on either the website or mobile.

0:08:48.9 Jessica: That then goes into what are other products doing out there that is similar. So we research other products, we research what the community is saying, and then that starts getting us into even more of like, okay, so do we have a specific user base? So experienced players who go out like once, at least once a week. So that could be a specific user base that we’ll focus on. Sometimes we create surveys to try to get those different kinds of users out. So then we can reach out and do certain kinds of other research elements such as user interviews, prototype testing. But again, this research going back and we started and we call it the discovery phase of every project. And that can depend, the length of that discovery phase is dependent on the project that’s being asked for us to look at. If it’s something we are already kind of in the know, or if it’s something we’re just improving, that would be probably a small discovery, maybe a week or two. Whereas if it’s a brand new kind of feature or something that is a workflow that our community uses like on the regular, such as, for example, like the logging flow or the cash submission process, those things are going to be a bigger discovery because, A, I’m always going to say if it’s a workflow that’s used often, we need to tread lightly in the sense of we don’t want to mess something up for the folks, for our community.

0:10:27.2 Jessica: And so, yeah, but we are always have sort of research in the brain as far as working with our data team to get that quantitative data out so we can find where, what the website or the platforms are using that helps us feed into figuring out the why people are doing it. So our data teams gives us like what they’re doing and then product design and research, we’re trying to figure out why or how or how to do it better.

0:10:57.7 Chris: So using the HQ event as an example from back in August, what kind of things are you hoping to learn? And then can you give us any examples of things that you did learn when you come out of an event like that where you’ve got a whole lot of people, a whole lot of very experienced geocachers that see your sign and they say, okay, I’ll play.

0:11:20.7 Jessica: Yeah. So the 20th anniversary celebration, having that product booth was something that I really wanted to have. I was kind of the initiator of that and the driver of that booth. We went through a lot of different iterations as far as what the goal of having that booth was, like what type of research, what level of research did we want? We knew that the people that were going to be coming to the 20th celebration were more experienced players that just tends to be kind of that regular mega event attendee. And so we wanted to kind of take that into factor. But one of the things after kind of syncing with the whole product team, we wanted to make sure that it was fun. We wanted to get the community involved to get them to a little bit of insights into what we do as far as it comes to research. We wanted to introduce ourselves. I wanted to get all of the product team out in front of the community and say, Hey, this is us. If you have feedback, come talk to us. So those were kind of factors that went into the activity. So we had three whiteboards up with post-its and markers at tables with like three big questions.

0:12:33.6 Jessica: One of them being, where do you see geocaching in the next 20 years? The goal for that question was to get an understanding of how the community thinks of geocaching in the next 20 years. And so it was really fun to go through all of those post-its and just kind of see where people aligned. The other big thing about that 20th celebration booth was seeing.

0:13:01.9 Jessica: How the product team worked. It was really fun to see a group of geocachers at the whiteboard and I saw some of them like staring and reading the different post-its. And that was part of why I wanted people to see what other people’s ideals were because it’s so big, this community, we play this game so differently. So it was a good idea versus having just an online, Hey, submit this online. And then that was just us. So seeing this group of geocachers pointing at the post-its and kind of laughing, I went over to them and I asked, Hey, what’s on your mind? And they’re like, I just think it’s so funny that this post-it right here says, get rid of challenge caches and somebody had written on it plus one.

0:13:48.1 Jessica: And then they pointed to a post-it like two different post-its, one posted down and it said more challenges, more challenges. And that was just so funny. And they’re like, there’s so many of these. And I was like, yeah. And I looked at them and I laughed and I said, cool, I’m going to do this. And I was like, I looked at them and I laughed and I said, welcome to the product team. That is something that is we, with all of the feedback, we are always on this sort of, everything’s sort of on the spectrum of like, we want more, we want more versus we want less, we want less. And so it’s just really fun. And that was one of the things that I was hoping and having those conversations, it did come out of like, look at all these things that are contradicting each other on these post-its. And that was really fun. The other big goal for that booth was really just again, to introduce the product team, but then to have people sign up to be participants in future research effort. We are always looking for people to be like, Hey, we want to help you in the future.

0:14:50.3 Jessica: Get prototypes, participate in interviews, which consist of phone calls or just interviews like video conferences. And so, yeah. And so we got a good list of that and it was a lot of fun. And I definitely want to do it again in the future.

0:15:06.5 Chris: From a product standpoint, as you have those conflicting ideas and sometimes completely just diametrically opposed to each other, how does the team try to sort all of that out and try to come up with useful information, as opposed to just throwing your hands up and saying, well, half of them agree, half of them disagree, flip a coin, I don’t know.

0:15:32.9 Jessica: That’s one thing that we struggle with. And really, that’s when we start looking into the details of possibly who said that, what kind of user are they, what kind of bucket as far as a persona that we put them in? Are they the everyday cashier? Are they the once in a month cashier? Are they new to the game? Have they been in the game the last 15 years? So those are the different factors, because then we can start bucketing the information that they’re giving us into sort of an archetype that then we can consider. That’s why I say, when we start a project, we need to define who we are planning this specific feature or detail to, because that helps us go into our kind of personas and be like, okay, this is for this person. But now we’re, and then the other thing that we look at is patterns. Like how many times is this happening? What’s the overall feeling of it? It’s kind of a push, a push-pull kind of thing when it comes to those sort of contradicting, but it goes into our bucket of just like, okay, we got this noted.

0:16:39.4 Jessica: Not everybody wants this, but maybe some people do. So then that is something that we can then think about the placement of that information. Maybe it’s not important to everybody. So it’s lower on the page, that kind of stuff. So all of this is very dependent on exactly what we’re talking about project wise, but it all kind of goes into our backlog of knowledge and just, we knowed everything. Like all of those post-its from the whiteboards activities got digitized, brought into three different software programs, and now we’re getting tagged as far as like, how might we categorize this? And so that goes into our ongoing research that goes into exactly what we do with a poll survey. And all of that information is sort of bubbled up as we then plan our roadmaps and our backlogs. From a design and a research standpoint, do the folks working on Google products or the folks working on widgets have very similar concerns that you have when you’re approaching geocaching stuff and the product team has? And then are there things that are, again, just very specific to geocaching and you wouldn’t hear about this at other places.

0:17:57.5 Chris: So yeah, I would say there are common elements to all product teams in all products that are same. Change is hard. Technical stuff needs to be updated. We’re always dealing with sort of technical debt or even design debt. When you can just real, real quick technical debt and design debt, because that’s a term that took me a little bit to learn. Maybe just give somebody a real quick definition of what those things mean.

0:18:23.0 Jessica: So technical debt is usually when you start off with a code base and then you are growing as we have grown in 22 years, but some of our code is old and we just have never gone back to update it. So that creates technical debt that eventually we will need to go back and update our code. So that way we are staying scalable and able to improve over time. And then design debt is sort of that similar stuff. If we had from 20 years ago, our website looks completely different than it does today. And, but we’re still, we weren’t able to just kind of update all of the designs across the board. We’re just doing this slowly. So that’s technical debt or that’s design debt. Every product has that. I would say that is not unique to anybody. And those are things that contribute to our backlog. A lot of the time, some folks in all, you know, users of all products don’t necessarily understand that. And so that’s going to be hard because it’s like, why did you change this versus that? And it could be because there’s a technical debt or a design debt that we needed to do it in order for us to improve going forward.

0:19:34.9 Jessica: So I would say that all those aspects are kind of similar to products and the design teams. There are so many different ways of playing this game. It’s unique to geocaching.

0:19:47.4 Jessica: But it’s also such a benefit because the community can pick and choose their own adventure of like, if they don’t like this cache type, they can go ahead and hide that in their filters and not have to kind of address that. So we kind of have to consider when we’re updating certain workflows of different of these different sort of non main, you know, going out, finding a geocache, logging it, those main work paths, we have to kind of realize that there are some people that aren’t going to like this. And how do we make sure that that isn’t something that’s going to be intrusive to the game? Like, as far as like, if this is an aspect that they like it, like to play, we don’t want to shove it in their face. We want to make sure that it’s something like, okay, they can kind of ignore that easily. And so that’s something that is also unique to geocaching.

0:20:38.0 Chris: You’ve been here for how many years now at HQ?

0:20:41.0 Jessica: So I have been here since 2019. So just over three.

0:20:45.5 Chris: And I know you’ve been to besides the HQ event, you’ve been to other mega events, you’ve you’ve been in the community. How has your approach or your I don’t know, this kind of a big question, but the ways that you look at design and research? Do you feel like they’ve they’ve changed over time as you’ve met people and kind of gotten to because I just feel like the geocaching community is so unique. And we talked about the worldwide aspect of it. But then also just people play the game so differently from person to person, even within the same region, I feel like it must take it must take time to get a handle on that. And so I think that’s a great question. But do you think that it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s it must take it it must take time to get a handle on that for a for a person in a role like yours?

0:21:25.2 Jessica: Yes, I am learning every single time I talk to a player, I learned something new. And it’s just it’s such an interesting thing. Like I learned different spots on the website that I still haven’t even explored. Into a few mega events now. And I enjoy talking to the community because like you mentioned, everybody plays differently and it’s so, it’s great. Like I’m always jotting things down or I have my phone and I’m always like, Oh, I’m listening to you. I’m just writing what you’re talking to me about down because all of this kind of goes into my research effort. And when I get back from mega event or I come back and I just have like a notebook of things that I either learned or things I need to look into. And then just again, different little avenues of like, Oh, this player likes this certain aspect. And if I’ve like asked them, Hey, can I reach out to you later? I kind of jot that down. So that way I can kind of go and deep dive into that conversation a little bit, um, more, especially when I know that projects are coming and I hear certain people talk about this one aspect that I’m like, Oh, there’s a research project or there’s a project coming, let me kind of reach out to them later.

0:22:45.9 Jessica: So yeah, those are kind of one of the things that I do at mega events. It’s just more of that listening and jotting that down, not really changing over time. I know when I, from 2019 to today, the one thing that I have learned is to not expect the same thing from anybody. Cause they’re all going to just say or play differently. And so that’s just been really fun. When I talk to anybody from the community is just like, okay, cool. How do you play and what sort of aspect do you play? And then I try to like put them together with other people that maybe I’ve talked about and like, Oh, okay. Well, they sort of are on this same path, except then they go this way. Um, and then they divide. And so it’s just really fun and interesting to hear all the different ways that people play. And that’s one of my favorite things to kind of do to talk to the community and figure out.

0:23:40.5 Jessica: There’ve been times when I’ve talked to people on the product team and they’ve talked about how they have a prototype for a change on the app or something on the website and they feel pretty good about it and they put it in front of users and then the users use it in a totally different way than they imagined. And I would think that would be exciting, but also maybe a little bit frustrating if you thought you, you thought you had this figured out and now you’re gonna have to change it around a little bit. You’ve, you’ve probably seen that happen a number of times, haven’t you?

0:24:12.4 Jessica: Oh yeah. It happens a lot, a lot more than not. Um, when we design, we design with this project in mind and how might we solve this, but we are not our end users. Even if we do play the game and we love the game, we still do not consider ourselves the end user because we’re in a different mindset than our actual players because of the fact that we design this, we are like, oh yeah, we know that this goes to this and this happens, but that doesn’t mean that our, our actual users know that. So it is always just such a interesting and fun thing to see a user use our prototype completely differently because sometimes how they would suggest or how their work around to our prototype just makes our, our job a little bit easier. Cause then we’re like, oh, okay, here’s another option. And how might we like follow that path? And then here, you know, at one test, we have this with every test. We sort of have a research goal in mind of like, okay, this is what’s it’s going to move. Does that, is that valid or not? And so when we come out of a test and we have 10 more additional questions, to me, I love it.

0:25:33.7 Jessica: Some people don’t, especially when we’re trying to quickly do things. But to me, whatever insights that we gather in a test is always going to help our end user and make a product better. To me, it’s worth it every single time.

0:25:48.8 Chris: Well, as you’re going through and you’ve been describing your role and research at HQ, I’m just mentally tallying up all the different skills that are involved, both technical and non-technical. And I’m curious if somebody wants to be a product designer, wants to do the sorts of things that you do.

0:26:10.1 Chris: What kind of skills do you think a person has to have? And both, again, like I said, both technical, but also from a mindset standpoint, it feels like you also have to have a lot of flexibility and curiosity and stuff like that. So what are the skills that come to your mind that are most important for what you do?

0:26:31.8 Jessica: Curiosity is number one. I think feeling the need to always ask questions, the answer of why, what, who, I think that makes a great product designer. That means you are curious about what they’re doing, why they’re doing it. I think communication, being able to talk to somebody and being able to listen to somebody is really big and listening without listening to actual, to hear an answer and be able to kind of consume that information. And also just understand that, you know, all feedback is good feedback, even if it’s bad, it still gives you insight into what’s going on. The other, another big thing would just, yeah, to just want to solve problems. That’s one of the reasons why I love doing this is I love solving people’s problems. I love being able to make something a little bit better for a person. So just wanting that is a good skillset, you know, having, you know, all of the technical, you know, having design a background or having research background. Research is really hard, especially sometimes when you’re hearing, you know, something that you designed for the last, you know, three months and you’re seeing somebody struggle with this prototype and saying bad things, you know you kind of have to just be like, this is like why I said, you never fall in love with a design.

0:28:05.5 Jessica: A design is always going to be able to be improved and just knowing that that’s one of the things and having fun, being able to kind of think outside of the box, because maybe introducing something completely wild will help you ideate or iterate more, more generate more feedback, generate more ideas and yeah, being able to collaborate, that’s another huge skill that I think a product designer needs. Being able to talk to all the different teams. One thing that I always say is I may like have the background and the degrees in design and research, but I think everybody has. Ideals that are great and we can consider. So I love creating workshops with different folks to get their kind of thoughts and even though they’re usually like, I’m not a designer, I’m like, that’s okay, you know what you like and I want to know what that is.

0:29:05.1 Chris: Well, this has been awesome. I’ve really enjoyed this and I could talk about it for a lot longer, but you’ve got things to design and feedback to consider. So I’ll let you go and do that. But thanks. This was a lot of fun.

0:29:20.1 Jessica: Yeah. Thank you so much. This was really fun. And yeah, I could talk about this all the time also.

0:29:25.3 Chris: So I’m sure if people see you at the next mega or is it like, I’m sure you’ll be able to take a look at the next mega or some other event. You will have your ears open. I’m sure I will look for the purple hair.

0:29:35.7 Chris: That was Jessica Randall, a senior product designer at geocaching HQ. Hope you enjoy that as much as I did. As always, the invitation stands to send us an email. If there’s something you would like to hear on the podcast, the address is podcast at geocaching.com or when you see me at an event or out on your ideas for our podcast, I hope the new year gets off to a great start for you. And that your fines are plentiful and your DNFs few in 2023 from me and Jessica and all the other lackeys at geocaching HQ. Happy caching.