
Increase of Daily Active Users YoY.
Increase of Conversions from Free Users to Paid Users
Lead UX Designer
Developers
GIS-Data Engineers
Marketing
OnWater is a GPS navigation app focused on helping anglers document and plan their time on the water with powerful planning tools. I was hired to improve the app and make the tools easy for users.
Aside from the UI of the app feeling outdated, the issues can be summarized in the following 3 points.
Coming onto this project as the first desginer, everyone wanted me to themselves. Everything was important
I had to focus on big impact from the right amount of effort. We got together and estimated impact vs. effort/time for our road-map.

Yes.
As a designer, I found that fixing a tooling was more impactful than revamping our entire UI Design System.
As we incrementally, and intentionally, worked through the Maps and Tools, our Design System practically built itself.
In order to take stock of what I was working with, I evaluated what existed via an app map to be used as a visual conversational tool with stakeholders.

Once I equipped myself with an easy-to-follow app map and the event trigger data we had on Amplitude, I was able to speak to the key tools that I saw our users found valuable and plan out our desired tool and feature-set.
The pink tools were the most used tool triggers for new users.

To address our Map issues, I set out to improve our Points of Interest, beginning with actual iconography, as well as addressing the contextual disclosure – displaying the right icons at the right time so as not to clutter the map.

Once we established hierarchy of visibility across zoom levels and Icon Styling. The next consideration was color differentiation for users to quickly recognize the type of POI.
This color-coded iconography was displayed with the following colors across the following areas where POI's were displayed.


The App Navigation was addressed alongside the On-Map tool feature set.
Inspired by Googles FAB -Floating Action Button, I needed a unique menu to allow for the user to find their "create" menu.

Our App Navigation, Heads-Up-Display with map tools and action buttons Redesigned to have a sleek UI and color pallete.


The Fish Species Layer was unique to our app as most navigation apps allows you to change the color of BaseMaps, toggle POIs etc.


DAU growth in 3 months.
DAU in 12 months.
Increase in Free to Paid conversions.
Decrease in bounce rate for first-time users opening the map.
Our journal feature was once our top used feature, the other tools improved to surpass daily usage.
How might we improve our journal feature?
What efforts were low hanging fruit that would not only provide user-stickiness, but also provide valuable data?