Case Study:
Geocaching Main Page

Geocaching is an outdoor game where people use GPS devices and smartphones to look for things that real people have hidden in the real world. There are millions of geocachers and millions upon millions of geocaches the world over.

The Geocaching main page had a bounce rate of 80%. At the time, the Geocaching homepage looked like this:

Use the website to turn visitors into Geocachers. People visit this site to find things hidden in and around their neighborhood. Memberships and swag and events don’t mean anything if they can’t do that easily.

I led the team through a game I call "Alter Ego." Simply put, you imagine what another person (or company) would do in this situation.​ We researched our favorite web and mobile experiences, whether or not those companies were in the same space or not.

I asked “Why do people come to this page?” My hypothesis was that people visited this page to see what’s hidden in their neck of the woods. That's the "chewy nougat center" of the experience. Every digital experience has a core action that matters most, and that thing has to work great or nothing else matters.

The core action of the Geocaching homepage should be seeing nearby geocaches and picking one to go find. That’s the game, and it was incredibly hard for people to do with the existing design.

We validated the hypothesis. We held on-site player interviews, built prototypes, and conducted user tests.

We introduced a user-focused homepage experience. The core action is front and center, impossible to miss, and every other portal on screen is related to the core action.

This revision resulted in a 35% positive change all web and mobile KPIs. More accounts created, more premium memberships sold, more purchases in the store, and more time spent on page.