Personally, when the map was announced, I set my location and did a quick map search. But then I totally forgot that the map exists until I read your post today.
I think the key design challenge for the map product is to deliver an ongoing stream of well-timed prompts to use it.
I want to notice whenever someone I’ve interacted with on the forum is in the same city as me. You could tell me about this:
(a) Whenever I interact with someone (e.g. their username name is visually highlighted if they’re nearby).
(b) When one of us change location (e.g. you keep a list of people I’ve interacted with, then trigger a notification when one of them is nearby*).
Ideally the EA Forum would request location access and update my location automatically whenever I log on. If I don’t consent to that, then it should periodically remind me to update my location, with the timing of those reminders perhaps partly based on IP address changes.
*Probably you’d want to rate-limit these a bit, and prioritise by things like recency and volume of interaction.
Adding on to this—we had a maps functionality on the EA Hub (eahub.org), but never tried to promote it or saw it as a particularly useful way to achieve the use case of “people nearby want to meet”.
To do that, we launched more advanced search functionality and a “EA Chats” which would have allowed matching on location. That functionality that was not launched, but had some good beta feedback of EA Pen Pals (and the 2015 version of EA Chats).
In general, we consulted closely with local group organizers to build functionality that would help them facilitate connections themselves (they were perhaps the “trigger”).
Unfortunately we were not able to test this out because we decided to retire the Hub before that, but my guess is that either of those versions would have been more robust ways of testing the functioanlity.
On the community map, you wrote:
What are the main things you did to promote the map?
Are you sure you’ve tested demand carefully enough?
Behaviour = motivation * ability * trigger. What is the trigger for using the map?
Personally, when the map was announced, I set my location and did a quick map search. But then I totally forgot that the map exists until I read your post today.
I think the key design challenge for the map product is to deliver an ongoing stream of well-timed prompts to use it.
I want to notice whenever someone I’ve interacted with on the forum is in the same city as me. You could tell me about this:
(a) Whenever I interact with someone (e.g. their username name is visually highlighted if they’re nearby).
(b) When one of us change location (e.g. you keep a list of people I’ve interacted with, then trigger a notification when one of them is nearby*).
Ideally the EA Forum would request location access and update my location automatically whenever I log on. If I don’t consent to that, then it should periodically remind me to update my location, with the timing of those reminders perhaps partly based on IP address changes.
*Probably you’d want to rate-limit these a bit, and prioritise by things like recency and volume of interaction.
Adding on to this—we had a maps functionality on the EA Hub (eahub.org), but never tried to promote it or saw it as a particularly useful way to achieve the use case of “people nearby want to meet”.
To do that, we launched more advanced search functionality and a “EA Chats” which would have allowed matching on location. That functionality that was not launched, but had some good beta feedback of EA Pen Pals (and the 2015 version of EA Chats).
In general, we consulted closely with local group organizers to build functionality that would help them facilitate connections themselves (they were perhaps the “trigger”).
Unfortunately we were not able to test this out because we decided to retire the Hub before that, but my guess is that either of those versions would have been more robust ways of testing the functioanlity.