During my break, I love to travel & explore new places. I am also a seasonal mountaineer. Before exploring new places, I research my desire place. For the research, I use some of the online tools & mobile apps. Finding & creating maps, export & getting map data to transfer another app, checking forums, searching best mobile app for offline navigation is really made me irritated. There are so many tools, I have to use for finishing the whole research process. Especially, the main pain part is to navigate to a new place with tons of mobile apps. Also, those app’s experience is really poor.

As a product designer, I decided to make a useful app for trekker, mountaineer, traveler. For this project, I assumed myself as User Experience & Interface designer

For the research, I followed the Design Thinking Process to find the best solution for end users.

Empathize

Though I identified the pain points, I needed to validate it with like-minded people. I needed to find out the pain was a common thing with similar people. So, I asked people about the problems & found something positive. They also faced those problems which I found previously.

Findings

  1. Getting lost in a rural place easily.
  2. No apps can import .gpx & .kmz file together whether they need both in some cases.
  3. Never found any working & detailed offline map.
  4. Don’t wanna use different apps for importing custom map data, following a route, measuring altitude & other GPS data in traveling which can be collected from the satellite.

Online Survey

I decided to gather some qualitative data from the interview to get more insightful perspective. I designed my questionnaire & made a google form to take an online interview & sent the link with people who were interested to take the survey. The survey gave me a sound amount of qualitative data over fourteen people of the user group. Which helped me to analyze & understand about users need.

User Interview

After the online survey, I wanted to capture more related data from end users. So, I decided to conduct a Guerrilla Interview with my user group. This time I made a simple but more inside digging questionnaire for the interview.

In this interview, I prioritized “Why” instead of “What”.

Define

Previously I learned my user group & try to dig their pain points & needs. Trust me, this was not an easy job for me to extract problems with the solutions from their subconscious mind. I got a significant number of problems from nine users.

“This is disguising to navigate my phone camera for capturing a photo while hiking or following a route.” — Hadi Mun

I analyzed all the problems & started a brainstorm session with stakeholder. Our purpose was to shape their problems into an intuitive experience. So, I tried to find the similar problems first & markdown them.

After marking similar problems, we discussed the solutions, how can an app interact with the users to make a simple journey?

Job Stories

Instead of user stories, I chose Job Stories framework to get the most user-centric solutions.

Story# 1

When I travel to an off-road like mountain range where the internet will not be available, I want to have a detailed map with my current location on my phone so that I can navigate & never lost in that crucial place.

Story# 2

When I go on an expedition with a team, I want to keep close to them so that I can never lose them.

Story# 3

When I am tired on a trek or it comes night in an unknown place, I want to take rest & sleep there so that I can avoid the unexpected problems might cause at night.

Story# 4

When I planned my next expedition’s route, I want to add my routes data to a detailed digital map so that I can access my custom map from my mobile during the expedition.

Story# 5

When I will be on a mountain pass or summit or a high altitude trek, I want to measure the altitude of these places so that I can know how much height I gain or loose & record altitude data.

Story# 6

When I am on hiking, I want to capture the scenic photos which can be tagged with my current coordinate so that I can easily find the place from where I took these photos & share with others to inspire them.

Story# 7

When I trek on a high altitude route, I want to know how much height I gain during this day & how much altitude I need to lose for sleeping better, most likely the “Climb high sleep low” reminder so that I can acclimatize my body during the expedition.

Task Analysis

I decided to analyze the tasks of users to understand the user’s goal & need to ideate their perspective. Job stories part was the real game changer to create a meaningful task analysis. The job stories contain user’s problems, motivations & proposed solutions and this kind of information is very important to analyze the user tasks.

Ideate

Job stories gave me an explicit view of user’s paint points, motivations & proposed solutions. Also from the task analysis part, I got a clear understanding of the user’s goal. These insights helped me a lot to ideate user journeys, tasks & the final goal!

Wire framing

This was the crucial stage where I had to visualize the conversation between the user & the app. But the task analysis part gave me a lot of context to ideate the user journey. This app has many goals for the various user but I needed a main goal/purpose of this app what was necessary for most of the user. Then I found navigating was the main goal of this app because most of the user wanted to use this app while traveling to the unknown places. This was also pretty clear on the job stories too.

Visual Design

In this part, the main challenge was making consistency within components, finding possible states, choosing the right color & creating a design system. Sometimes, I have to use some logic & common sense to make a simple but useful journey for the end user. I used material design to make an intuitive interface.

I kept all the important actions in the home so that user can easily access what they want. From the insight, I found the Search & Navigation were very important actions. That’s why I made them prominent. In the search journey, I kept nearby tracks in the initial state of search to help users to find their closest route without knowing the name of places. Also, the rating will help them to choose their desire tracks.

This journey was pretty challenging for me. I had to figure out the best experience because this is the main & important action for the whole app. There are two conditions for navigation journey.

  1. If a user is new & hasn’t imported any route, he/she will be led to tracks page from where they will find their desired track.
  2. If a user has already imported & used a track, navigate button will be jumped to the map with the layers of the imported route.

Prototype

After completing the visual design, I want to see the design with life. So, I have decided to make a clickable prototype to check the overall experience. For the prototype, I used Figma as I also used it for visual design to make my workflow simple.

As figma don’t support dynamic hotspot, I have to show the simple journey in this prototype. All the conditional journey will be in the next phase.

Usability Test

In this stage, I was pretty excited about the test result. My hypothesis might be right or wrong in some cases but I had to valid the overall experience from the users perspective.

Before conducting the usability test, I made a usability testing plan to streamline the whole process with a facilitator & note taker. Here is the outline of my usability test plan:

  1. Overview
  2. Goals
  3. Methodology
  4. Usability Metrics
  5. Roles
  6. Participants & Recruitment

Conclusion

The project was for practice purpose. I tried to push myself in such challenge which I never faced. To finish the whole project, I have to surf too much virtually & physically to gather information about the users. Finally, I learned a lot of design decision, process & tricks to solve a real problem.

Also published in Medium