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Trekker End to End Design
PROBLEM
People have trouble researching and finding trails to explore and can find outdoor recreation apps clunky looking and confusing to use.
Trekker sparks adventure by providing the power to discover and explore trails nearby and all across the globe.
ROLE
Product Designer | Researcher
UX Design, Visual Design, User Research, Information Architecture, Wireframing, Prototyping, User Testing
10 week timeline
SOLUTION
For the MVP, the goal was to remove any unnecessary bells and whistles that could be confusing or distracting. Instead, Trekker provides users a clean, minimalist UI and experience that helps them achieve their goals.
Location and activity based trail recommendations
Personal Trail Recommendations
Social Media Feed
Keep up with your social circle
Motion tracking | geographic and position-based navigation
AR Map Navigation
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USER RESEARCH
I interviewed 5 potential users with varying activity levels and expertise with outdoor recreational apps. With the information obtained from the interviews, I created Empathy and Affinity maps to visualize the users' pain points and opportunities. This also helped structure the architecture of the application.
Research Questions
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Can you walk me through the last time you planned an exciting outdoor activity/trip?
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What did a day in your life look like during that trip?
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How do you keep track of information when planning for trips?
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Tell me about the purposes your most frequently used outdoor recreational apps have served you, if any.
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What kind of things did you do at the conclusion of your trip?
Empathy Mapping
Affinity Mapping
MAIN INSIGHTS
COMMUNITY, COMMUNITY, COMMUNITY
Community is highly influential in directing users’ decision making from where to generally visit, what specific trails to take, what to pack, and even where to take pictures so I decided to center the majority of features for the MVP release around this shared sentiment of community.
More Insights
Efficiency
Users want to conduct their research quickly and visit as few websites and apps to gather information.
Compile and organize the necessary information into one platform to decrease the amount of time users spend researching by offering consolidated storage of information.
Simplicity
Users complained of how difficult and confusing other competitor apps were to use.
Create simple, intuitive features that ease and immerse users into the app and prepare them for updates and further feature releases.
PERSONAS
I began brainstorming different features that would adequately address these points after speaking with my users and understanding their needs, wants, and pain points.
Jamie​
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Adventurous, avid hiker
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Wants to spend less time planning
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Prioritizes safety & feeling prepared
Simon
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Leisure hiking required for his photography
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Wants to quickly gather information to help decide what trails to take
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Prioritizes scenery and getting around efficiently
SETBACKS
"Scope was too large..."
"so...started thinking like a PM again"
I had a clear vision and direction I was heading in but a week into the design process, I realized my scope was too large to accomplish within the time constraints of this project. I took a step back and started thinking like a PM again - I created a backlog, estimated points for my features, charted out feature dependencies, and created a roadmap. This process concluded with an MVP solution that didn’t have all the bells and whistles I originally wanted to include but definitely lays out a great foundation to build a product that eventually will.
PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
Prioritized backlog with estimation points
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What are Jamie and Simon's goals?
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What features would they use most?
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How many effort points needed for each feature?
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What are the dependencies?
Now, Next, Later Roadmap
DESIGN IMPROVEMENTS
Based on user feedback and the new direction I wanted to take Trekker in, I reformulated and ​continued to iterate on my designs and came out with these 3 pivotal improvements:
Visual Redesign
Page: Homepage
Based on feedback, users felt the original home screen was too noisy and lacked clear direction.
Directed focus onto the activities available nearby rather than inundating users with various icons, maps, and tasks.
Replaced Tabs & Bottom Navigation
Page: Trail Details
Users were having trouble identifying icons to perform important tasks (Share Trail, Start Trail).
Rearranged the screen to bring focus to the labeled icons and create a custom bottom nav for this page to help users navigate through trail details.
Deconstructed Steps to Review Trail
Page: Review Trail
Upon feedback, users feel less overwhelmed when tasks are deconstructed into smaller steps.
Higher possibility of users leaving reviews if they feel less stressed.
THE FINAL PRODUCT
STYLE GUIDE
SO WHAT DID I LEARN?
Start with Agile
Like I mentioned previously, I had a very clear vision for this product and I was so excited about unveiling features I hadn't seen in other competitor apps. I designed for a couple weeks before realizing that I hadn't thought out the intricacies and edge cases for each screen (ex: keyboard placement shifting contents on the screen). Finding these errors caused me to severely scale back the feature list and continue with an iterative, agile product development methodology.
Thanks for sticking around till the end and hope you enjoyed my first case study. If you have comments, feedback, or just want to know how the hell to pronounce my last name, feel free to reach out to me at veda.gottumukkala@gmail.com. Cheers!
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