Life360: Vision for Future Enhancements
Life360 had grown quite quickly and some of the interfaces and features were beginning to show their age and limited functionality. I was asked by the UX director to envision enhancements to our core product flows. My main goal here was to put together a presentation of what a future vision of the app might look like with some recommendations for our Product Team to consider over the coming months and year.
Audit & Research
I worked with our data team to find our most used screens and features to identify the places where vision thinking would best be applied. After working with data, I partnered with Product Management to take a look at some of the most used social and mapping apps on the market. We worked together to identify some common themes, patterns, and visuals which could enhance the Life360 app.
Identifying High Impact Areas
After some research and design sessions, the areas that we agreed to provide vision work for were our main Home screen, our mapping Location History screens, and our Messages product. These were the features and areas that were most important to our users and these seemed like the perfect place to anchor our vision.
Home Vision
The home screen suffered from too much noise, with not enough information for our users. Users wanted a way to see an overview of their Circle members and get an ‘at-a-glance’ view of their activities. I worked to clean up some of the visual noise and add features like tagging and more featured drill-downs into their history.
Location History
Location history was the main meat of the Life360 product so creating a visually pleasing, and easily understood timeline was essential to me. I looked at a number of different mapping and way-finding apps, as well as social media timelines, and version history features in software products. Creating a timeline versus our existing card stack really helped to give users a feeling of the trip over just a listing of details. Daily summaries helped to highlight any major actions the Circle might care about.
Messaging
Our messaging system was a very standard, basic feature chat/messaging product. I felt that we could leverage thinking from forums and chat software to organize this information into threads. Threads would make it easier to parse the information, as well as giving Circle members a place to respond to specific questions or information. We found that our current chat/messaging system was under utilized due to this issue.
Results
I presented the work as a roadshow style presentation to all the product teams and the executives to get feedback and see if there were any discussions to have around scheduling the work on our roadmap. Everything was very well received and sparked a ton of further ideation and feature developments for a number of places within the app. More than anything, it gave us a visionary framework to begin to talk about how we advance the product.