Project Description:
Campit is a concept piece of a sister website App for REI company. It is designed to help people spend less time on planning their camping trip.
v1 of the Project was created within a 2 week timeframe.
Tools:
Sketch App, InVision, Omnigraffle
My role:
I played a UX Designer role. In particular, my assignment included:
- Research, learn about how people plan their camping trips, find out which parts of the planning process are the most time consuming and why;
- Come up with solutions on how to minimize time of a planning by using Campit App;
- Give users a possibility to buy camping gear using the App;
- Sketching;
- Prototyping;
- Usability testing.
Opportunity:
According to the recent North American Camping Report, there’s been a significant decline in number of campers compared to previous years. Campers say it has become very hard to plan camping trips in advance, especially if it’s necessary to synchronize them with other campers. Trip planning simply takes too much time now and people prefer to stay at home instead of investing hours into planning.
Why it’s interesting:
The problem is interesting, because people started camping less not because of interest but because of the obstacles they have to face in terms of time and planning.
My Design Process:
1. Research:
Competitor comparative analysis
Work on the project started with an exploration of the world of camping. I needed to find out what is offered to campers and what issues they usually face.
Various camping reports, competitor analysis and camping blogs helped me draw a general picture of what camping is to people, why they like it and what some of their essential equipment is.
It appears that there is plenty of competition in the given market, although all available offerings are not ideal and have certain drawbacks.
The goal is to outline just the right functionality and design information architecture structures to maximize usability and findability, yet stay flexible enough to support a range of different user goals.
Alice Liddel, primary persona
After domain research I worked on User Interview Script so I could lead my users during the interviews and keep them within area of my interest.
I conducted 4 user interviews with people from a range of camping backgrounds. With help of an Affinity Diagram the user data was synthesized into a persona - Alice Liddell.
During research phase I found out that Alice prefers to plan ahead and to camp with her family and friends. She creates checklists and shares responsibility for camping gear with other camp members. She likes to camp close to her home, not more than a 4 hours’ drive away.
Customer Journey Map, Scenarios and Use Cases were created to consider these characteristics
With all of the above in mind, I started creating the App for Alice, one that will help Alice spend less time on planning and more on actual camping!
2. Plan:
Concept Map
Analyzing User Data I created a Concept Map.
My persona cares about her destination, she enjoys camping more if her friends are camping together with her, she likes to do different kinds of activities while camping.
This Concept Map helped me to define main directions I needed to work on.
3. Design:
I started with some quick sketches. The home page is designed to be very simple and to not overwhelm Alice, who is already pretty tired and stressed.
Home Page
Planning Page
Handwritten sketches were recreated in Sketch software and, after a few iterations, converted into clickable prototype.
4. Test:
I went through 3 usability tests and revealed a couple of really important Usability Issues I plan to work on.
Usability testing was a really interesting experience and it was very hard to stay observant when the user was struggling with the user flow.
Prior to usability testing I composed Test Scenarios. My users tried to complete certain goals while I was observing. I asked questions and took notes on their responses.
Conclusions:
Planning a camping trip is a hard task and it becomes harder as more people get involved. Poorly designed Apps convert the planning process into an enormous effort and result in user frustrations. After I tested my v1 I came up with a lot of ideas on how to improve the App and I can't wait to go through another iteration of usability test sessions again!
The most important things I've learned:
- Users don't see your design the same way as designer sees it (confirmed);
- It's hard not to take design critique personally, but it's doable;
- User Research interviewees and Usability Testing interviewees might have different goals.
The next steps I recommend:
- Change style of the App;
- Make user flow more clear and linear;
- Redesign checklist section.