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0:00:14.6 Chris Ronan: Hello there! Welcome to Inside Geocaching HQ, the podcast about the goings on at Geocaching HQ in Seattle. I am Chris Ronan. My geocaching username is Rock Chalk. I am one of the lackeys at HQ. Most of us still working remotely these days, though, a few have returned to the office, of course, complying with guidelines from local health authorities. We are most definitely looking forward to the day when we can welcome you back to visit with us at HQ. That will be a great day.

0:00:47.7 CR: So on this episode, we turn our attention to Adventure Lab, a newer app and platform from the HQ team. With more and more adventures available around the world, there is a lot more talk in the community about those adventures. So I thought it would be a good time to have Erin Thompson and Stuart Schwartz come by to discuss the state of Adventure Lab and where it’s going. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to read a recent post in the Adventure Lab section of the Online Geocaching Forums. We will include a link on the podcast page to that forum post. The post is titled Update on Adventure Lab Platform Vision. There is a lot of detail in there covering some important points about Adventure Lab, and I got into some of that stuff with Erin and Stuart. Here we go.

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0:01:49.4 CR: Okay, we have Erin and Stuart from the Adventure Lab team, and it’s been a while since we talked about Adventure Lab on the podcast. And so I thought it would be good to catch up on where things are right now with the team. And it’s been a while since each of you has been on the podcast. Erin, I was looking back, you were here to talk about GIFF a few years ago, so a little bit has changed for you at HQ as far as what you’re doing. So maybe we can start with that, just some introductions of the two of you. Erin, what is your role in the Adventure Lab team? What is your title? And for folks that may have been familiar with you previous to your time on this team, what other stuff have you done at HQ over the years? 

0:02:35.0 Erin Thompson: Well, thanks, Chris, for having us on the podcast today, exciting to get to talk about Adventure Lab and where we’re headed. As you mentioned, I’m Erin. I’ve had a few different roles and worn a few hats at Geocaching. My current role is Product Manager on the Adventure Lab team and working with the folks who build up this platform. And previously I’ve worn again several hats, including I have worked as a product manager on some of the website teams and some of the features that we released last year like the Cache on Our Dashboard, and maps, and some of the other features over there. Before that, I also had the opportunity to work with the community volunteer support teams, specifically with translators, with volunteer translators, and with GIFF, as you mentioned, with the film festival. I have enjoyed working in all of those roles because I think it strengthens a deep understanding of the geocaching community of which I would consider myself as well. And now, getting to use that over in the Adventure Lab product space to figure out what’s next is really exciting for me.

0:03:55.0 CR: Stuart, you had been at HQ longer than myself and Erin. Could you describe what your history has been like at HQ, and what you do now, and specifically, with the Adventure Lab team? 

0:04:08.0 Stuart Schwartz: Yeah, I’ve been with HQ for almost 10 years, nine years and change. And I was hired on originally as a full stack web developer. I worked on most of the website with respect to geocaching. Pretty much any part of geocaching.com, I’ve probably had a hand in some of the software there, the website itself and the APIs behind it. Throughout the years, I’ve worked with so many people within the building, and I’ve communicated with so many people outside in the community. It’s been really eye-opening and it’s been such a great growth opportunity working here at HQ. I really appreciate all of the different facets of this game, and just all over the place with respect to the things that I’m curious about and I like to tinker with, both with respect to the end impact in the community and the technologies that make it happen.

0:05:01.8 SS: With respect to my role here on the Adventure Lab team, my role is currently lead developer, that’s my official title, but essentially, I’m just really just synthesizing concepts and enabling people through technology. That’s what I’m doing on a daily basis, just trying to really get a feel for what the opportunities are out in the community, and what capabilities we have here, and just how to put those together. So it’s mostly about how to put things together and make them work. I hope that answered that question.

0:05:37.0 CR: Yeah, it totally does. And besides the two of you, what does the rest of the Adventure Lab team look like? How many people are we talking about? And what kind of skills and roles do those people play on the team? 

0:05:48.9 SS: I can speak to that a little bit. The Adventure Lab team, it’s a whole cross-discipline product delivery team. And what I mean by “cross-discipline” is that it’s not just engineers, it’s not just folks who know how to draw very nice-looking graphics. It’s a big collection of all of those things. So we have three engineers, including myself, so I’m a lead developer, and we have two React Native developers. React Native is the mobile technology we are using for the Adventure Lab app itself. It’s a pretty cool technology, works on both iOS and Android. That gives us a bit of a advantage with respect to how quickly we can put software out there and try new things. The team is also made up of a designer who is oftentimes sort of charged with figuring out how to sort of constructing a vision for what the software will look like before the engineers actually implement it. And then we have a product person who is in this chat with us, that is Erin.

0:06:52.6 SS: There are a couple other people who float in and around the team. There is a Scrum Master, is the role title, but it has numerous titles within different companies. We kinda call the role of Scrum Master here, but that person is mostly in charge of keeping us on-track and making sure that we aren’t stuck. So facilitating communication and facilitating daily process around the team itself.

0:07:22.0 ET: I would add a couple of the folks who float in and really enable us to move quickly as we work closely with the API backend team if there are questions around our technology and supporting them with the databases or with the APIs. And then we’re also collaborating with quality assurance, QA, and have recently begun working with QA here at Geocaching to support the development.

0:07:53.6 CR: Before we get to where Adventure Lab is now and the vision for it going forward, I thought maybe we just touch briefly on where it’s been and how it’s gotten to this point. It’s got kind of an interesting history for people that maybe haven’t been playing for several years, maybe you’re newer to the game. And Stuart, is it fair to say that you’ve been pretty involved with at least the Adventure Lab app, and kind of the transition from Lab Caches, as they were strictly known mostly at Mega-Events several years ago, and this transformation that we’ve had since I think about 2018 into the app. Is that fair to say, that you’ve pretty much been, you’ve had your hands on it throughout? 

0:08:38.8 SS: Yeah, that’s a really fair thing to say, a really fair statement. I don’t know if it’s well-known, but I put together the original mobile web version of the labs.geocaching.com player back in 2012-ish, 2013-ish. So I put together the very first playable prototype for the platform that eventually became Lab Caches. So I’ve had a hand in this since the beginning. The original genesis for it was I believe some of the founders had just come back from a Mega-Event in Europe, and they had heard that some of the folks who are hosting that event had a need for temporary private geocaches that could sort of enable visitors to that event, but the geocaches needed to… They didn’t quite conform to the rules of geocaching because they were to be private and temporary. So the idea was to create this concept that could support that use case.

0:09:42.6 SS: And originally, I think Jeremy, one of the original founders, wanted to call it Adventures and sort of take that opportunity of private temporary geocaches and slap some additional interactivity and opportunity on top of it. So opportunity for storytelling, he was a very big advocate for the power of storytelling. Storytelling is a very compelling thread that weaves its way through human history, so it feels only kinda natural that it might be something that we could sort of slap on top of a potential sort of adventuring platform that enables people to explore. So that was the original sort of genesis for this thing. And we put together a mobile web prototype, which wasn’t ideal for playing in the field ’cause web, you generally think of, is for desktops and PCs. But mobile web was just becoming a thing back in a decade ago, and we figured that was great for an MVP, that we could get people outside playing these things probably with that.

0:10:46.9 SS: And we did, and you’ve seen it. I’m sure people listening to the show have seen what labs.geocaching.com probably looked like back when it did have a mobile response and web player. If you hadn’t seen it, if you’re newer, the TLDR on that is that it wasn’t terribly effective. It was good for a prototype, but it was difficult to use, the usability was very poor. So it proved out the hypothesis that this had value and it was compelling for groups of people, but it wasn’t quite what we had envisioned for it. So over the years, we just sort of let it bake in the community and see what the community did with it.

0:11:23.6 SS: And then sometime around 2018, I kicked off a… React Native was a new technology. It came out about five or six years ago, I think. It became pretty mainstream. And just a few years ago, I adopted it, took some, went to a conference for it, and sort of was inspired by it, and I thought, “This could be a technology we could use to take that Labs’ prototype and make it a native mobile app.” So I kicked off an effort to put a prototype together, the company supported it. We rallied a team around it, and eventually shipped it, and it worked out. It’s just kind of snowballed to where we are today.

0:12:03.0 CR: And so over the years, leading up to when that app was launched, and then in the time since then, how have you and the rest of the team, and Erin, you as well now, tried to corral the many ideas that come in, the asks that come from the community? There are, I’m sure there must be, is it fair to say hundreds or more of various ideas for improvements and new aspects to the app and new things that people wanna be able to do with Adventure Lab? And how do you go about trying to collect all of that feedback and try to find ways to prioritize what could work and how long it would take to build, and just all of that stuff? I’m just kinda curious as to how the team goes about tackling that part of things.

0:12:54.0 ET: I am new-ish on the Adventure Lab team. I’ve been on the team now for two months. And as part of my own ramping up into this role, I really wanted to understand the breadth and depth of that ideation that has been happening over years, and especially in the last two. Since the player, the app went live, we’ve been feedback from a multitude of sources, in-person, in the app feedback, community response, also looking at data. I would validate that the idea list is in the hundreds, somebody recently throughout maybe 600 ideas, it might be close to that. And currently, they’re in a spreadsheet and I’m tracking them actively. The feedback from the community is incredibly valuable to help us identify the wants, the needs, the hopes, where this product can provide value to existing geocachers and also, really, to expand the audience to welcome new folks into this exploration of the world around them.

0:14:10.9 ET: And one of the ways we look at all of that feedback and prioritize is by, I like to call them themes. I think themes of where might this add value or utility to players, where might this add… Some of it is purely a pain point, or some of it is new features. Some of it is really innovative, which is hopefully is the juicy stuff that we really want to be able to enable and innovate with this platform. That’s part of our vision of where we’re headed is, “How do we enable creators to tell the stories to be more compelling and more interactive with the world around them?” That, I think, is really the opportunity space that we are trying to look at. And there’s lots of those ideas as well. And then we layer, there’s multiple factors of the strategy of where we’re headed with Adventure Lab, and tracking all that feedback, mapping it to, “What are the paths to be able to provide what creators are asking for, to be able to enable and unlock creators to create more compelling stories that are approachable for existing geocachers and also, welcoming new folks?”

0:15:33.8 CR: There was a post in the Geocaching Forums at the end of March made by HQ, and I will include a link to that on the podcast page. It was titled Update on Adventure Lab Platform Vision. And we can talk about the content of that post and some of the points that were made there. What was the inspiration for that? And what were we hoping to get across when we shared some of that information with the community at the end of March? 

0:16:02.8 ET: Like as I mentioned, I am new on the team, roughly two months this week, working with all of the folks who’ve been stewarding this vision. I’m not new to geocaching, but new to really deeply understanding Adventure Lab and the vision of where it’s headed. And as I began to work with the whole team, the company, really, the product delivery team itself, Stuart, the other engineers, the folks who’ve been answering community support questions, and the senior leadership, Bryan, who I think has spoken recently about this vision for Adventure Lab as well. I really felt like it would be valuable to communicate where we’re headed, and put some of that down on paper so that the community could see and reflect, and that we could also reference that we really see an exciting opportunity space ahead of us. And collectively, a lot of these words already existed, but hadn’t been shared, and thought that it could be a valuable tool for communicating where we’re headed.

0:17:09.0 CR: So we can go through a couple of the points that were shared in that post and maybe talk a little bit more about them. One of the first ones, and you guys have each kind of touched on a little bit to this as we’ve talked so far here. But one of the first ones was talking about the experimental nature of Adventure Lab and how, I guess what I was taking away from the point, which was, and I’ll just read it: “HQ will continue to experiment with the platform and with features to enable more people to discover and explore the world around them. And the improvements may happen in steps, and there could be some instability along the way.” I guess when I read that, to me, was, “Hey, this is still a work-in-progress. We have a lot of stuff that we wanna try, a lot of possibilities out there, and it might go a little rough and tumble here and there. So hopefully, you’re okay with that. And what we’re hoping is we’ll get through that part, and then it’ll, we’ll all come out the other side and it’ll be a lot better for it.” Is that a pretty good summary? 

0:18:08.9 SS: I think that’s a pretty good summary. I think if I were to expand on that bullet point, that sort of headline a little bit, essentially, designing software is pretty easy to physically design software. It’s kinda like just computer science kinda stuff, you just map it out. But to really meet people’s needs is super difficult. Most of the time, needs are unknown, so they’re unknown in advance. You generally don’t know you’ve met needs until after they’re met. So there’s a bunch of approaches to discovering undiscovered, unmet needs. Those are usually phrases as opportunities. It’s hard because you don’t know what they are in advance, oftentimes, but you sort of know they’re out there because economies can grow infinitely. There’s just infinite opportunity out there. There’s so many ways to make things better for other people.

0:19:03.5 SS: What we’re doing is taking an exploratory approach, explorative, I’m not quite sure what the word is there, we’re exploring our way into opportunities within the geocaching community and communities outside the geocaching community in the space of location-based. Essentially, the mission of the company to inspire and enable adventure and exploration and community. We really want to be able to do that as well as we can.

0:19:32.1 SS: We believe that there’s more opportunity in this space, and our intention here is to sort of carve out an expectation that we will be exploring our way into this space, and we won’t necessarily know if we’ve made it or not until after we’ve tried. So we’re hoping that the community will support us in trying and will come with us, and help us by letting us know if we did or did not meet needs. And if we didn’t, we’ll take it back a little bit and try something else.

0:20:01.3 ET: I’ll explain a little as well because I think one of the things I think of often is that our time to experiment with useful, let’s call them features or tools, we are adopting an approach on our team where we want to be able to get experiences, features, tools out faster. And what this means is they may not be perfect. A lot of the feedback I read from the forums and the Facebook posts and the community, there will often be a question around this concept of perfection. And we are actively trying to get features out faster, which may mean they’re not perfect on the first try. We will learn, and it is our intention to not be perfect so that we can try faster to learn if what we’re building really does unlock something for creators or unlock something for the player out in the field who is experiencing this.

0:21:05.7 ET: And so I think it’s that ask, that expectation that it won’t, that we are trying to not be perfect with our releases. And it’s very easy, I think, as humans, to see the small imperfections and focus on them. And we really wanna be looking at the experiences and enabling people to get out there. Stuart actually shared a really great thought process with me, and I think a lot about my car. I drive a 2001 little Honda. We call it the go-kart. It doesn’t have brake shocks, and it bounces a lot, but it gets me from point A to point B. So it’s not the really, really nice Ferrari that would be beautiful, but it works, and it’s fulfilling that value right now. And then we can try to fill more of that value sooner if we’re not building the Ferrari right away, and that’s the only thing we’re building. Not recommending go-karts necessarily be the way, but getting to that experience quicker is our goal.

0:22:14.6 CR: So continuing to go through that forum post about the vision for Adventure Lab, one of the points was that HQ intends to expand the Adventure Lab audience and welcome creators and players beyond the current geocaching community. And as that happens, some decisions will favor welcoming new audiences, rather than trying to integrate Adventure Lab into the existing geocaching game. And so I wonder if we could just talk about the background behind that, and what that points to in the future.

0:22:50.8 SS: Our attempt with Adventure Lab is to create a superset around geocaching so geocachers can enjoy it, and people outside of geocaching can enjoy it. It’ll have something for everybody. That’s our intention. In order to be a superset, it has to support things that core geocaching just can’t support. With Adventure Lab, we would like a place to experiment with enabling location-based experiences that are in the same spirit of geocaching, exploration and adventure, but with a little more flexibility. Sort of relieving the requirements that geocaching currently has so that we can enable exploration and adventure in locations in ways that geocaching currently cannot. In order to continue to do that, it’ll be very difficult, if not impossible, to reverse-integrate some of those features back into core geocaching simply because we don’t have control over core geocaching.

0:23:49.3 ET: I would also say at a high level, we hear a lot of feedback that geocaching isn’t as accessible for many people in certain circumstances. We want Adventure Lab to be available and approachable for anyone who wants to explore the world around them. And maybe that means that they are temporary. Maybe it means that they are inside. Maybe it means that they tell really compelling stories that move people through the world around them, but that story happens within 0.1 mi of the next stage. And so that’s not possible in geocaching. We want to enable the flexibility for more exploration and discovery by more people. How can we unlock new opportunities for those who haven’t found geocaching to be available to them, or who don’t have the tool set or the woods, or the willingness to go and put their hand in dirty holes trying to find containers? How might we still enable exploration and adventure for this whole other group of folks that we’ve heard feedback from? 

0:25:03.0 CR: So the Adventure Lab platform will be, will continue to be distinct from core geocaching, it’s one of the things that was highlighted in that forum post, “with a limited intersection of features” was the words that were used. And one of those intersections came recently with adventure pins on the map in the Geocaching app, which was something that people have asked for for a long time. I wonder if we could just kinda talk about what kind of a project that is, to have an intersection like that between the Geocaching app and the Adventure Lab app. Kinda seems like it would be a pretty significant project. How much time goes into that? And how much overlap is there between the two teams in trying to work together to make sure that this feature is working the way it should in both of these apps? 

0:25:53.4 SS: This was mostly on our core mobile team, the majority of the effort and the majority of the interesting challenge was with the core mobile team. How to get access to the directory of adventures, and how to display the pins alongside core geocache pins. I believe there was quite a large effort to re-factor the maps to even be able to support this use case, to re-factor the code that drives the maps. So I can’t take a significant amount of credit on the Adventures team, we can’t take a significant amount of credit. The majority of it was with the core mobile team.

0:26:26.2 SS: The intersection of the features, in general, I like to call it a convenience feature. So for geocachers who want to be aware of adventures near them while they’re geocaching, this feature provides them with some awareness of what adventure opportunities they have near them while geocaching. So the feature itself, I wouldn’t necessarily call it an intersection because it’s not necessarily doing the same thing on both platforms. They do happen to be pins on both platforms, but the intent is just to make geocaching users aware of Adventure Lab opportunities.

0:27:07.7 ET: Yeah, I was gonna add a little bit to that with regards to dots on the map. And a lot of the feedback we hear and one of the decisions we’ve made around really wanting to focus on where we’re headed with Adventure Lab, and enabling storytelling for creators, preserving the stories that creators are trying to tell and also, our vision to really build something new and innovative with Adventure Lab, I believe that ties into both the dots on the map conversation, and the making decisions around intersections with core geocaching because we really wanna preserve the space to innovate. We envision more for Adventure Lab and not all of it.

0:27:54.9 ET: We envision so much innovation that we don’t think it will be possible for all of it to be functional on core geocaching. It is a unique platform, and we want it also to be engaging for geocachers. But a lot of the functionality are the dreams we have. The opportunity space that we’re trying to preserve by not necessarily, at this time, adding more features to core geocaching is to enable us to experiment with additional opportunities that the community has asked for with storytelling. And we really want to enable that. And for the time being, that’s the direction of where we’re headed, is looking at the ways that we can unlock more tools that may not integrate fully, and most likely, won’t be possible on core geocaching.

0:28:50.0 CR: Well, we have to wrap up here shortly, but going forward from this point, what would you like people to know that we haven’t talked about so far? And maybe where can they go if they wanna share feedback or what have you as this Adventure Lab process continues into the future? 

0:29:09.4 ET: That’s what I was thinking about sharing, is that if you go to the Adventure Lab app and sign in and go to the profile, there’s a feedback button where you can send us your ideas. And I’d love to hear the innovations that you are seeking. What could Adventure Lab do that is beyond what we’ve already been dreaming up? I would love to explore more of those ideas of where you think storytelling in the future with place-based tools like Adventure Lab could go in the future. If you have that feedback, I’d love to hear it. That is the best place right now to share that with us. We actively look at that feedback from the in-app tool.

0:29:53.5 SS: I do want to reiterate that we are attempting to innovate and build something new with Adventure Lab. We envision Adventure Lab enabling storytelling to provide players with opportunities to learn something hidden in plain sight about the world around them, something that they would have never realized that this platform expands their understanding of the world around them. So we have big dreams for this platform. And I think it would be so helpful for us to hear about the dreams that the community might have for this platform, what opportunities do you see that we could incorporate into this thing.

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0:30:32.0 CR: Thank you to Erin Thompson and Stuart Schwartz for stopping by from the Adventure Lab team. I hope there was some interesting information in there for you. If there is a topic that you think we should cover on the podcast, please send an email to podcast@geocaching.com. We get a lot of our episode ideas from your emails, including the idea for today’s podcast, so keep those ideas coming. Until next time from me and Erin and from Stuart and all the lackeys at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.