Happy fall everyone! It’s been several months since we posted our last product update, and I’m excited to fill you in on all the improvements we made to the OuterSpatial product over the summer. Let’s jump right in!

Challenges

Some of our organization partners are planning to run big challenges using OuterSpatial in 2023, so we continue to work hard to improve the core functionality of this feature. We recently rolled out a few significant enhancements:

• Redesigned challenge task cards display more information about the check-in location for a challenge task, including distance from the visitor’s current location and parent area name, if available.
• Completed challenge task cards are now tappable. This makes it easy to get back to the detail screen (including the map!) for the attached area, trail, point of interest, or outing after completing a task.
• Visitors can now “override” location validation for challenge check-ins. This ensures they can check-in even if their device’s GPS fix is inaccurate because of heavy tree canopy, rugged terrain, or something else. Check-ins that override the location validation are flagged so your organization can decide if it wants to accept them or not.
• Time-based and geofenced notifications associated with challenge tasks can now be setup with more granularity and are less error prone.

We’re also putting the finishing touches on some gamification features that will be available for all challenges in the next few months:

• The ability to add badges to both challenges and challenge tasks, and award them to visitors.
• A “Social” tab that provides a running list of all challenge task completions from all of a challenge’s participants.
• A leaderboard that visitors can use to see how they’re doing, re: challenge task completion, compared to other participants.

Reserve Now

As part of our new partnership with Tyler Technologies, a “Reserve Now” button now shows up on location detail screens for locations that are reservable in Tyler’s Recreation Dynamics system. Tapping on it takes the visitor directly to the corresponding web page where they can reserve the campground, picnic pavilion, etc.

This feature is only available in a few communities right now, but we plan on rolling it out for others in the coming months. If your organization utilizes Recreation Dynamics for facility reservations and you’d like to take advantage of this new integration, reach out to our success team.

Improved Beta Program

Our revamped beta testing program allows visitors to sign up for our iOS and Android beta testing programs directly in the app. Once signed up, visitors will receive an email that walks them through the process of getting setup to test beta versions of the OuterSpatial app. We also plan on using the beta program to capture user research and execute usability testing.

If you’re interested in helping us improve the OuterSpatial product, take a look at this knowledge base article for information on how to join the beta program.

Dashboard Analytics

Next time you log in to Manager, you’ll find two weekly analytics charts on the dashboard that highlight visitor usage of your community(-ies) in OuterSpatial Mobile and Web.

Locations Map

We added a clickable map so you can see all of your organization’s locations in a single map and easily navigate to edit pages for each location. You can access the new locations map by tapping on the “Locations” section in Manager’s sidebar navigation.

Other Improvements

As usual, over the course of the summer we also made a number of smaller enhancements and bug fixes across the OuterSpatial product.

Mobile

• Over the last couple of months, we’ve doubled-down on OuterSpatial Android, making substantial improvements to the stability and performance of the app. We plan on continuing to invest heavily in Android, and we will — of course — keep you updated on our progress!
• Article, event, challenge, and location cards throughout the app have been redesigned to show critical information in a more consistent and clear way.
• You can now specify multiple parent areas for an outing. Specifying one or more parent area for an outing adds important context that shows up in outing cards, search results, etc. and ensures that the outing shows up on the parent area’s detail map.
• Added a new “Notification Settings” section to the app settings. Visitors can use this to subscribe/unsubscribe from OuterSpatial’s notification channels — including Tips & Tricks, Product Updates, Social Engagement, and Favorite Updates. Additionally, visitors can subscribe/unsubscribe from the two notification mechanisms, Push and Email, for each of these channels.
• Improved the Explore search by making articles, events, and challenges available in search results.
• Renamed “Bookmarks” to “Favorites”, gave visitors the ability to “Favorite” an organization, and redesigned the “Favorites” screen under the Me tab.
• Surfaced posts that are attached to child trails, points of interest, and outings in the Area screen’s “Social” tab.
• Made it possible to delete an OuterSpatial account directly from within the app.

Manager

• Added a product tour to the dashboard to help new organization team members get oriented within Manager.
• Added a download button for campaign QR codes.

Conclusion

That was a lot, so thanks for sticking with us! We’re already hard at work on a number of big new features for next Spring/Summer. To give you a bit of a sneak peek, we’re prioritizing improvements to app onboarding, notifications, alerts, the community home screen, and social tools. Stay tuned!