🔗 The evolution of Wandrer's 'Untraveled roads' feature

Wandrer is the game you win by exploring new places. The main rule is that you get credit for every road you travel, but only once. In order to progress, you have to go places you’ve never been before.

You can connect your Strava account to Wandrer right now for free and see how much of your town/city/country/continent you’ve completed. We’ve only had one country completion so far (Singapore), but maybe you can be the next one to do so (especially if you live in Monaco, Andorra, Liechtenstein, or San Marino).

The core functionality of Wandrer is crediting the user with the sections of road that they’ve completed. Determining these numbers of a subject of a separate post, but for now let’s just go with the concept that all of the GPS data from your activities gets boiled down to “completed portions of roads”: 0-100% of Main Street, 25-72% of Spring Street, etc.

In order to know what portions have been completed, Wandrer must also keep track of the portions of a road that the user hasn’t completed. At a basic level, these just inverses of each other. If you’ve traveled 0-40% of a road, then the untraveled portion is 41-100%. Or if you haven’t traveled on a road at all, then the untraveled portion is simply 0-100%.

Side-by-side image of your GPS data (red) with traveled road credited in blue. Untraveled roads are shown on the right in black.

This is all background to the real subject of this post, however, which is more of a case study in how Wandrer displays information about your incomplete and untraveled roads. As you have seen, nothing about that road information is terribly hard to understand, but how the untraveled roads feature has been implemented has taken several different forms as Wandrer has grown.

This seemed like a good feature to discuss because, while the ability to view your untraveled roads is an important part of Wandrer, I think most folks would consider it a small aspect of the site overall and might not be aware of the work involved in designing and re-designing it. Each incremental improvement led to another, so much so that the current implementation of the untraveled roads feature is pretty unrecognizable from the first version.