Visitors can use OuterSpatial to discover your organization and find their next adventure. On the organization side, OuterSpatial will help you reach your visitors, share your authoritative data and content, and understand what your visitors value and how they engage with the outdoors.
Here at OuterSpatial, we believe in a mutually beneficial relationship between those who love to get outside and the organizations who manage and protect our outdoor places. We’ve worked for years to make this vision a reality, and we’ve collected a lot of feedback along the way. This feedback has helped us understand what both visitors and organizations genuinely need. That’s why we decided to redesign the OuterSpatial Mobile home screen and introduce some new and exciting features.
Home Screen
Community Switcher
The Community Switcher is now more prominent and easier to tap. OuterSpatial supports both OuterSpatial communities and sponsored communities.
OuterSpatial communities contain bundles of outdoor content from multiple organizations within a well-known and defined geographic area (like a state in the United States or a province/territory in Canada).
Sponsored communities are curated and created by organizations that share overlapping interests or traits — like official partnerships or a similar/shared mission. These communities are perfect for organizations who want to display specific outdoor information in one area, similar to a standalone app.
Interested in creating a sponsored community? Reach out to us via our contact page. We’d love to chat!
Search Shortcut
We’ve heard feedback from visitors that they sometimes have trouble quickly finding a specific area, outing, point of interest, or trail in OuterSpatial Mobile, so we’ve created a Search Shortcut to get visitors into the search tool directly from the home screen.
Visitors who already know where they want to adventure can tap on the Search Shortcut in the top right-hand corner of the new home screen to jump directly to the search tool in the Explore tab.
Tabs
We’re making it easier for your visitors to understand what OuterSpatial is all about! With the past version of the home screen, we received feedback that it wasn’t clear what you could DO in OuterSpatial Mobile. So we’ve reorganized it to provide clear labels for sections so visitors can better understand the vision of OuterSpatial and quickly get to the information they’re looking for.
The new “Bulletin Board” is where you can highlight the most critical information for your visitors. It’s the first thing visitors will see on the home screen. Compared to how Hero Items worked in the previous version of the home screen, the vertically scrolling feed means Bulletin Board items will increase the visibility of your most important information. Visitors can scroll through the Bulletin Board to see what’s relevant and learn more about your organization and the rest of the community.
Under “Experiences”, we’re giving you more robust content management tools. For this first version, we’re keeping things simple. We will display all articles and events similar to how they were on the previous home screen. Soon, however, we plan on adding the ability to bundle and tag Articles, which will make it easier for visitors to sort through your content and engage with Articles relevant to their interests.
Previously, organizations displayed at the bottom of the home screen, and this placement didn’t entice visitors to interact with them. Since organizations are such an essential part of OuterSpatial, we wanted to elevate the way we display them. Now, visitors can discover organizations more efficiently by using the “Organizations” tab. From there, visitors can access organization profile pages, view an organization's information, and connect directly with the organization via the contact and social media tools.
We’re also excited to announce a new feature that you’ll find under the “Challenges” tab. We’re giving organizations the ability to create challenges and share them with visitors. Completing a particular challenge could entail checking-in to a series of trailheads, responding to a questionnaire while camping in the backcountry, circumnavigating sections of a long-distance trail, or posting photos from a series of stops on an outing. We're currently beta testing challenges with a few organizations, but all OuterSpatial organizations will soon be able to create challenges in Manager and make them available in OuterSpatial Mobile.
Quick Filters
With this release of OuterSpatial Mobile, visitors can now filter the Explore map and list view according to their interests. Do your visitors want to find dog-friendly trails, a biking trail, or be assured the area they’re heading to is open? No more searching through content, visitors can now find this information with the tap of a button.
We’re also giving visitors a way to access these filters from the home screen so they can discover their next adventure even more quickly. Filters work by connecting “tags” associated with an organization’s OuterSpatial locations (areas, outings, points of interest, and trails) to user interface components. These “tags” can be easily removed or added in OuterSpatial Manager (we’ve provided more detail below on what this process looks like).
Here’s a list of filters we’re supporting for this first version:
- Location Type (Area, Trail, Outing, and Point of Interest)
- Open/Closed
- Dog-Friendly
- Accessibility (Wheelchair-Friendly and Visually Impaired)
- Activities (Hiking, Biking, Horseback Riding, Off-roading, Hunting, and Fishing)
- Seasons (Spring, Summer, Winter, and Fall)
- Family-Friendly
Want to see more filter options? We’re working on expanding what you can tag locations with and what visitors can filter by, so email us at organizations@outerspatial.com to let us know what you’d like to see moving forward!
How These Changes Impact You
We know there are many changes, and we are here to help if you have any questions or concerns. We believe these changes will make OuterSpatial Mobile more robust, easier to use, and ultimately better for both organizations and visitors. Nothing will break from these changes, and your organization (and visitors) can take advantage of a more robust and usable application.
Here are links to knowledge base articles on the new Bulletin Board and Tags you may want to take a look at:
We expect the new design to increase how visitors engage with your organization, so be sure to have your contact information and social media profiles up-to-date. You can find your contact information in Manager by clicking “Organizations > Contact Information” or “Organizations > Social Outreach”.
Additionally, we anticipate that visitors will interact with your organization's locations and content more, so keep an eye on your analytics! You can read more about our Visitor Analytics in our knowledge base article on the topic.
Lastly, if you’re excited about these changes and eager for your visitors to download the latest version of OuterSpatial, check out the “Campaigns” feature in Manager. You can use it to create deep links to content in OuterSpatial Mobile, with associated QR codes, so visitors can follow a link and open the app to a specific screen. Take a look at our knowledge base article on campaigns for more information.
