Navigation on a watch: dwMap Premium
Part 3 of the story of dwMap and dynamicWatch
After the launch of dwMap (as recounted in dwMap — the Origin Story) and the rapid subsequent development of the watch app and route planning website (dwMap — After the Launch), we started to see an opportunity to both serve the market with a continuing free version with the current feature set, while gathering more advanced features into a Premium offering. We set the goal of keeping the free version completely usable in its own right, with nothing removed from it, nor changing it into some sort of limited trial version, and focused on building Premium around all-new features.
Designing Premium
We actively maintain a list of all user-requested features, and since we use the app ourselves on every ride, run and hike, we continued with the original story of observing first-hand what the needs of avid athletes are.
From that we drew up a shortlist, and used SurveyMonkey to survey a random sample of our active users to ask them what they liked and didn’t like about the app/website, what features they felt were lacking, and which of the proposed new features they would use most often.
We finally had the list of feature to work on: customizable data fields, route navigation prompts and off-course warnings (turn-by-turn directions), elevation profile and stats in Planner, editing of imported routes in Planner, OpenCycleMaps (OCM) as a map type option, waypoints (with an eye especially towards geocaching), multiple separate legs in routes, GPX exports, and a advert-free experience.
The first two of these, data field customization and turn-by-turn directions, were overwhelming the most requested. Data fields were relatively straightforward, as we already had 12 fixed data fields in the app and just needed to add additional commonly used fields, and a tool on the website to design the layout. Turn-by-turn directions though was a whole new thing.
Turn by Turn Directions
Our programmer Marcus Needham has a deep background in maps, and has worked on aspects of navigation directions before, particular in the innovative use of them for skiing in his SnowRanger GPS product.
However the challenge is very different in the Garmin watch case due to the very limited memory and CPU speed on the watches for an app like dwMap. Only limited mapping data can be downloaded and stored, and only a certain amount of state information can be calculated and stored (eg, are we on route? If not, where is the nearest part of the route? Where is the next turn?). A new GPS point is available every second, so we needed to make sure each point was processed well within that time, and we also needed to continue doing all the other things the app has to do within each second, such as redrawing the screen and handling user taps and button presses.
Probably around 75% of the time spent developing Premium went into the turn-by-turn directions feature, and by June 2016, we’d got a system that worked well, both “in the lab” and after miles of real world testing running and cycling.
Launch
dwMap Premium was launched on June 27th, 2016, with a small party for friends and supporters at Dirty Water, San Francisco. 75 minutes after the website was updated, our first sale was made!
Premium is priced at just US$9.99/year for a compelling, truly useful set of features, and works on all our supported Garmin watch models.
In the time since then (April 2017 at the time of writing) both the free and Premium versions of dwMap have continued to soar in popularity, especially once March turned into April and spring came to our largest markets (USA, Canada, UK, France, Spain, Germany).
Since then Premium has continued to acquired advanced features, such as an integrated feed of the user’s Garmin activity history (allowing a great route from a recent activity to be saved with a single click), a route archive that lets the user keep a large collection of past routes, and, most recently, adding new trail routing options for MTB and hiking using the GraphHopper service.
The icing on the cake of an exciting year was the news that dwMap has won Garmin’s inaugural Best Wearable Smart App award, announced at their 2017 Developer Summit!
