Goldi’s Hiking App
Completely fictional case study for my students
ROLE Team of one for research, analysis, prototypes, mock-ups, and usability testing.
LAUNCHED With every class
It’s just a story
I teach Digital Product Design at Nashville Software School. I am always looking for good examples to explain each step in the process. I have many projects that would cover that, but there’s always that NDA to worry about. To be sure I was not using any proprietary or private information I conceived this faux-project to use as a case study. The research and design are true, but the company and product are complete fiction.
Heads Up: The audience for this case study is students. It is very long with more details that you may be interested in.
The Client
The startup, Raise the Barre, is a health and wellness services company that emphasizes healthy lifestyle management by building health habits with proactive healthcare and healthy lifestyle management. Currently, they provide online videos for self-managed exercise programs designed for women. They want to expand their products to capture younger, teenage women. The company believes that building healthy practices as teenagers will continue as a habit as they age. And a company that helps them with this healthy goal will be a product they can rely on as they grow up. Raise the Barre wants to be that company.
The founders are big believers that good habits start young and women are taught at a young age to think of others first. They wanted to start a service or product targeted to teenage girls that would be easy to start but provide a challenge for them to grow with and maintain. After interviewing some clients’ daughters and doing some online research, they decided to first focus on hiking.
The Process
Problem Statement
How Might We offer self-directed training and tools to help teenage girls hike in the woods safely AND enjoy the activity enough to do it again and to share the idea with others?
Clearly identifying and communicating the problem lays a strong foundation for a project. It’s a “Goldilocks Situation”: A problem statement that is too narrow won’t offer enough room to explore solutions. A statement that is too broad won’t provide a clear starting point. It must be just right.
Research
Research Plan
Understanding what people value leads to new opportunities. Researching user and customer behaviors related to the product is enormously valuable for testing hypotheses and finding patterns to design the right solution.
Research is addictive. Talking to users and experts is fascinating. Exploring and analyzing competitors is inspiring. But you need to have a plan to stay focused that ensures a framework for decisions.
Activities & Interactions
Hiking (solo & in-groups)
Teen activity planning
Teen group physical activities
Decisions/initiative to plan hike
Teens with smartphones (apps/sites)
Parents (desires for their daughters and what the girls are allowed to do)
Environments
Hiking on trails and Teen rooms/homes
User & Customer Interviews:
Users & Customers
Teen girls with interest in outdoor and/or athletic activities
Teen girls who are not interested in outdoor and/or athletic activities (for comparison)
Parents of teenage girls
Competition
AllTrails app
Spring Moves app
Zombies, Run! App
Zen Labs
Hiking & Backpacking Trips with US National Parks (websites, maps)
Lessons from Research
The biggest lesson I learned from the research was that we had overlooked pre-teens in our initial hypothesis. They are doing more research and chatting with friends about “parent-free” activities than we had assumed. We also learned that the obvious “early adopter" would be teen girls not interested in team sports. The traditional high school athlete does not necessarily spend their free time engaging in sports activities unrelated to their team sport. I also underestimated how unwilling a young woman is to admit inexperience or look naive in front of anyone – peers, elders, younger siblings.
Personas
After interviewing 5 Outdoor Semi-Enthusiast Teen Girls, 2 Pre-teen Girls, 6 Mothers (2 single, 4 parenting with a partner), and 1 former Olympic Athlete, I finalized the Personas to guide the design. Personas are fictional characters that represent different users or customers. They are captured in descriptions that include behaviors, patterns, attitudes, goals, skills, and environment – with a few personal details including a name to bring the persona to life.
Teen Outdoors Semi-Enthusiast Girl: Interested in being more “outdoorsy” but family is not interested. She is healthy and usually signs up for team sports at school or community groups. But like most teenagers, she is very interested in activities she can do with friends and without parents.
Pre-Teen Emma: Craving independence and ready to be a teenager. Wants to do things without her parents but is also a little worried about getting too far away from their protection and guidance.
Overtaxed Tracy: Wants the kids to be active and healthy but is stretched so thin it’s hard to get everyone out and moving, Looking for things teens can do on their own and ideas for easy-to-start activities this family can do together.
Insights
The next step toward designing the solution is to make sense of the research findings.
Easy to Do, Challenge to Master
One thing I heard over and over in interviews was the fear of looking stupid. A completely typical human teenage fear. They want to try new things but are often afraid they will embarrass themselves. Hiking is easy to get started and offers opportunities to improve and master more difficult terrains and conditions.
Commonalities Across Different Users
Analyzing the research highlighted common needs and wants across all the users’ ideal user experience.
Sharing: The primary users, Teen Girls want to easily share plans with friends so they can get everyone on board. Busy mothers want to know where the girls will be without chasing after the information.
Planning: Teen girls are bigger planners than I expected, but it makes sense. Planning gives them a chance to prepare and conquer that fear of looking stupid and unprepared.
Impromptu: Planners they may be, but spur of the moment is not unheard of either. Offering a quick list of easy, medium, and hard trails with directions was a common request also. Mothers liked the idea because it helped them point to an app the daughters would use to get “off the couch and outdoors” and without it making it seem like an order from Mom since it’s the girl's app.
Social Media: Photos, selfies, and videos are a given for almost any event. But hiking often involves poor cell reception and no wifi. Planning to be offline did not occur to most of the interviewees until I brought it up.
User Journeys
Every interaction a customer has with an organization affects satisfaction, loyalty, and the bottom line.
A Journey Map is a visual interpretation of the overall story from an individual’s perspective of their relationship with an organization, service, product, or brand, over time and across channels. Journey Maps communicate the user’s point of view and the process of creating a map forces conversation and an aligned mental model as the team works together.
Illustration of 4 different users’ journeys across the same process
Prototype
Design is 80% research and 20% design. Prototyping is a bridge between research and design.
App Versus Site
Not every internet product needs an app. In this case, the features and attributes of an app will best serve Raise the Barre’s new product:
No connection: Users may not have cell or wifi connections on the trails so I need to have local features that cannot be reached through a web browser.
Making use of mobile device features: Took advantage of mobile device features GPS, compass, accelerometer, contact list, camera, phone calls, etc. Those features improve the user experience by reducing the user’s efforts while making it more interactive and fun.
Personalization: Tailor communication to users based on their interests, location, usage behavior, and more.
More time spent on apps: Mobile users spend 88% of their time on apps versus websites.
Low Lo-Fi Paper Prototype
Sketching is a way to think about and communicate solutions, but solutions cannot be created before you understand the problem. There’s also something fabulous about paper prototypes that opens up discussion. Since the time has not been spent making it “work” in prototyping software, people are more comfortable providing ideas and opinions.
Since I was interviewing high school girls, I thought they would be interested in the process and sketched the ideas in a brainstorming session with them.
I am embarrassed to admit the most important feature that came out of this brainstorm that I had not thought about: sharing videos and photos!!! It was one of the first things my volunteers asked about and one point they were most passionate about.
Wireframes
Even though prototyping tools make it very easy to start with colorful styles, black-and-white focuses the designer on optimal, accessible designs. It also helps the reviewers stay focused on the functionality instead of being distracted by personal impressions of the palette, icons, and other general style details.
That said, consider the audience. I started with black and white photos but found that was more distracting for my teenage audience. If I did it again, I would use color photos and maps, but keep the rest black-and-white.
Home
Home page content updated per user’s location, previous searches, and past hikes. Vibrant, engaging photos available from US National Parks sites.
Search field at top so return users can quickly search
Iconography to quickly scan and gauge interest (ex: dog-friendly)
Menu bar
Trail Detail Page
Toolbar with key features for hike. Testing pointed out the map was too low on the page. The driving directions could be removed from the toolbar and replace with trail map.
Distance and time gives user feedback to reassure them.
Map toolbar link change to link to detail when map displayed so user can easily swap between the 2 sections while on their hike.
Search
Selections designed for mobile — quick selections, less typing.
Change this to show selected filters and keywords on results page.
Tap heart for user to easily build a list of saved hikes. List can be viewed from toolbar (10).
Usability Test
Lessons Learned
More Pictures: The initial wireframe designs did not provide a good, easy way for the user to share photos and videos of their hikes — an important part of any phone app, especially for this target user type.
Quick Tips: Users would like tips included on the trail page
Sharing for Planning: This age group plans for two main reasons: peer-group buy-in and parental permission.
Parental Control: Add a filter for parent subscribers to limit choices for pre-teen girls
Hi-Fi Prototype
After research, design, and testing, I named the app Breadcrumb in the spirit of the fairy tale origin of Goldilock’s journey through the woods. The Breadcrumb app is targeted at young teenage girls. The content, interactions, colors, images, and graphics were selected to appeal to their taste.
Another important detail to consider in the visual design is the app will be used outdoors. It needs to be readable with the reflection and glare on a glass screen in bright sunlight and shady trails.
OK Kids…
This is where I ran out of steam. Creating a fake company with a new fake product AND a very long case study is time-consuming. I will come back and finish the hi-fi prototype but posting this iteration is more helpful than waiting for perfection. (Yes, that is intended to be a not very subtle suggestion that you should not wait for perfection to post your own portfolios.)
YOUR Case study should have a link to the working prototype and color palette and fonts from the style guide (or more if you are very proud of your style guide.)
Hope this is helpful. Now it’s your turn! Share your portfolio — however far along you are with your case studies.