TERRA: A Hiker’s NEW Best Friend
to Provide the best hiking experience from planning to the last step of the journey
The consequences of being unprepared are usually never desirable and this also applies to hiking. Without adequate research and preparedness before each hike, someone could get hurt or even lost.
MY ROLE
UX Researcher, UX Designer
DURATION
2 weeks
TOOLS
Figma, InVision
The challenge
As hikers ourselves, we recognized the frustrations that come with hiking from spending too much time researching on multiple sites to struggling with cell service issues to wanting to share the experience with others after. However, nothing currently exists as a collective solution to address these pain points.
BUSINESS opportunity
As a key player in the outdoors apparel market, we would love to have Columbia as a potential business partner as they are well positioned in the hiking space and we deeply resonate with their mission and values. Columbia strives to do right by the people they reach, the places they touch and the products they make.
By partnering with Columbia, we will be able to leverage their 80 year old legacy and customer base to drive users to our app, as well as benefiting Columbia by:
Extending their customer’s experience and journey past just purchasing items
Competing with their major competitors who already offers a hiking app
Increasing sales by promoting their products
PRODUCT Values
As a product team, we created a set of principles to further align with Columbia’s values to ensure that design will empathize with both the partner and the target audience we are building for. The four pillars include:
Promoting the practices of being eco-friendly
Having an active lifestyle
Taking safety precautions and measure on hikes
Building a social community around hiking
Design PrOCESS
USER RESEARCH
We conducted five interviews with hikers to learn about their hiking experiences, preparation and research methods before their hike, and habits and behaviors during the hike.
To better organize and learn what we gathered from the interviews, we used affinity mapping to synthesize the data to understand the main concerns for hikers when it comes to planning and routing for their hikes. Here are the key insights:
PERSONA
Based on these insights, we created a persona to represent the target audience to keep us focused and to help us design with the users in mind.
Vanessa, The view seeker, 25
Vanessa is an accountant and loves to go hiking during her free time. She usually finds herself spending too much time researching for hikes before she starts one and even then, she still finds herself unprepared during the hike. Further, during the hike, she needs offline access and the ability to share her location with loved ones to keep her safe.
Problem statement
How might we help hikers create a peaceful and fulfilling hiking experience where they can focus on nothing but the nature around them?
IDEATION
Based on the patterns and trends identified in the research phase, below were some of the potential features we explored with:
Based on these insights and potential features, we started to ideate the design through a Design Studio session where our team sketched out our own ideas separately and then we came together to actively discuss the elements we liked to collectively create a centralized design for the Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
THE solution
As we have seen from our research, hikers including Vanessa need to feel prepared before going on a hike as well as safe and equipped during the trek. Therefore, we designed an all-in-one mobile application named TERRA to allow hikers to do the following:
Explore new hiking experiences
Learn what each trail offers
Keep track of hikes and stats
Use tools available to keep you safe
Join the hiking community
DESIGN FEATURES
usability TESTING
For the design iterations, we performed two rounds of usability testing to get feedback on the overall design and flow of the app and validate whether users found it useful. Primarily, we wanted to focus testing on the features that are unique to our app and not already included in other hiking apps.
Here are our testing results:
Key takeaways:
For 6 of 7 tasks, almost all the users were able to navigate to the right place right away (green circles)
For the first task, users were going to other places first or did not complete the task (yellow & red circles). We found that users were confused with the wording for the scenario and task. So just to be sure that’s the reason why it did not perform as well, we will want to retest this task with updated language to validate if that was the reason.
Participants who have never used a hiking app found TERRA to be straightforward and easy to use. They liked that it was not overloaded with content and it was easy to find the key information.
Everyone generally liked the application and agreed that if they were hikers, they would use this app, especially the features they have never seen on another hiking app.
Next STEPS
The design should continue to be iterated and be tested — especially to take a closer look at the first task. Further, some other features we did not get to include in the MVP should be considered for the next phase of the project such as:
Building out the hiking community with:
Direct messaging
Leaderboards
Meet-ups with other hikers
Addition of augmented reality