Spring is here, and we’re working hard to make sure OuterSpatial is ready for increased usage across many parts of the U.S. as warm weather arrives.

With the support of many of our partner organizations, we’re doing a broader rollout of challenges. A lot of the work we’ve put into the product over the last couple of months has focused on improving the stability and usability of this feature. More active challenges are added to OuterSpatial’s communities each week, and it’s been so fun to see organizations use this feature in novel ways to inspire their visitors to get outside more!

We’re also hard at work on some big new product priorities that we’ll have more to share about soon. In the meantime, this post will catch you up on how the OuterSpatial product has improved over the last couple of months.

OuterSpatial Mobile

Our quest to build the best outdoor recreation app continues! As always, make sure you're on the latest version of OuterSpatial iOS or Android to see the latest.

Detail Map Improvements

Area, trail, and point of interest detail maps have been reworked to show only pertinent locations. We also made these maps (along with the organization detail maps) tappable. These improvements bring consistency to all maps throughout the app.

Me Tab and Settings Screen​

We implemented a simplified, condensed layout and more intuitive groupings to improve the usability of the Me tab and Settings screen.

Paper Map Screen

We also redesigned the paper map screen to bring it more inline, design-wise, with other screens in the app. Additionally, a new tool was added to this screen that gives visitors the ability to hide the paper map, bring it to the top, or move it below OuterSpatial’s locations.

Closed Cartography

Closed areas, trails, and points of interest now display with cartography that clearly designates them as closed. This means visitors no longer have to tap on a location in a map to see if it’s open or closed.

Mobile Search

We heard loud and clear that search in Mobile wasn’t working as well as it should, so we implemented a round of improvements to improve the usability of the tool. The improvements made include full-text search, a better matching algorithm, more intuitive sorting of search results, and the ability to search for organizations. We have more search improvements staged in our product roadmap, but this first iteration is a big step forward.

App Loading in Android

A few months ago, we released a new version of OuterSpatial iOS that included a complete rewrite of how the app loaded community data. Big news: this functionality is now available in the Android app as well! This improvement should result in a dramatically improved initial load time for communities, and it also paves the way for coming improvements to the app’s offline functionality.

OuterSpatial Manager

We continue to work hard to improve the stability and performance of OuterSpatial Manager. We also added a few of our most highly-requested features.

Custom Date Range for Analytics

Organizations now have the ability to specify a custom date range for Visitor Analytics reports. With this change, reports can now span months and years, so you no longer have to run individual monthly reports and then merge them together manually.

Organization Access Requests

Organization employees can now request access to your organization in OuterSpatial. When an employee requests access, all of your organization’s admins will receive an email with a link they can follow to approve or deny the request.

Simplified Organization Onboarding

We implemented a new onboarding tool to make it easier for new organizations to quickly get up-and-running in OuterSpatial. Know of an organization you'd like to see in OuterSpatial? Feel free to send them to manager.outerspatial.com, where they can create their organization and jump into Manager — on their own and for free!

Challenge Participants Report

We added a new “Participants” report for challenges. This means it’s now possible to get a complete list of participants for a challenge, including participants who haven’t yet completed a challenge task.

Upload GeoJSON for Outings

We also added a new "Upload GeoJSON Route" tool to the outings route editor. If your organization has a GIS shop, you can use this tool to import an outing route directly from your GIS.