Sproutshout

Design Challenge

HMW design for the on-foot exploration experience to be immersive and allow meaningful connections with their urban environment?

Our challenge revolved around understanding how do we help urban hiking facilitate connection while improving the current experience?

Overview

What is Urban Hiking?

Urban hiking meant taking a walk in an urban environment with an intention to explore the space.

Who are our users?

Young crowd (20-30s) who are interested in exploring spaces and connecting with new urban environments.

Secondary Research Findings.

People who explore on-foot feel greater ownership of a space and we wanted to explore that.
People take urban hikes beyond physical fitness, It involves a sense of adventure.
People plan and change their routes to pursue interesting experiences.

Our Concept

Let’s Go is a digital service that supports spontaneous & planned urban hikes and capturing memories created on the way.

Here is a concept video I developed that describes what Let’s go does.

Key Features

Let's Go

It starts here, at the Let's Go logo and opening screen.

Home Screen

Landing provides suggestions to nearby hikes based on past hikes, these may be curated or generated.

Make me a Hike

Input specific interest and preference to enable system to generate new hikes for you.

Hike Details

Look into the hidden gems and map of the route, modify hike with other gems you like. Save or take it immediately.

Apple Watch Integrations

Nearby gems are notified, take detours on hike to visit gem that strike you fancy.

Memory Stamps

Add audio-visual stamps on special locations on your route and look back onto to your memories in the area.

Process Timeline

Although I played a key role in all the listed tasks, I took over significant responsibility on tasks highlighted.

Research

Social listening
Desk Research
Research Plan
User Interviews
Thematic Analysis
Insight generation

Ideation

User Personas
Brainstorming
Affinity Map
Downselection
Competitive Analysis
Lean Canvas
Journey Map

Prototyping

Information Arch
Service Blueprint
App Prototypes
Video Prototyping

Evaluation

Wizard of Oz
Feature Evaluation

Ideation

From our desk research we came up with 40+ ideas. These were affinity mapped and then dot voted.

We created scenarios for top 5 ideas and evaluated them based on the goals of becoming they tied back to and on how well those goals provide for our design challenge.

Downselection

Brainstorming & Affinity Map : With desk research we came up with 40+ ideas and affinity mapped them.
Dot voting & Scenarios : We did a dot voting exercise and created scenarios for top 5 ideas
Selecting Final Idea: Our criteria was how close the idea provided for hedonic be goals of self improvement and development.

With our evaluations we restructured the idea with most value into a final concept, laying out the potential features. Introducing our first draft of Let's Go below!

User Interviews & primary research

We needed to refine the multiple offerings Let’s go could provide and conducted primary research. We conducted 6 semi-structured interviews with a short memory sketch activity. My main role was in drafting the research plan and then synthesizing findings from the interviews into insights and journey map.

Key Findings

Planning phase should consider transportation, route walkability and landscape.
An ideal urban hike experience should allow time and space for in-the-moment decisions.
Digital experiences can be disruptive but when done right, they enhance experience.
People want to commemorate a hike in a variety of ways at various moments.

User Journey & Pain points

Planning Stage

Researching and planning a rewarding hike that will reflect a hiker’s specific preferences represents a large cognitive load for hikers.

Experiencing Stage

There is little flexibility to explore off-route spontaneously or avoid certain obstacles without inconveniencing the hiker with re-routing.

It can get boring to take the exact same route back, especially after experiencing an emotional peak

Reflecting Stage

There is no integrated way to capture the multi-faceted memory of the hiking experience.

Refining our Idea

With our findings as our guiding light we moved on to refine our idea and scope down to features that mattered. I led making the assets below to distill our final offerings and create a prioritised key path to prototype and test.

Lean Canvas

I started our exploration into the features by defining a customer journey from planning to reflection, capturing the actions and thoughts that lead to fulfillment of user needs.

Experience Prototyping : wizard of oz

We prototyped the idea with wizard of oz with 3 participants to gain insight into what kind of interactions are expected.

Above is an experience test in progress, we embodied our app and recorded the process.

Key Findings

User wanted more customizability than just including preferences.
User wants more points of excitement of a perspective route to be highlighted.
Let’s Go must cater to a lot of spontaneity and in-the-moment changes.
Memory stamps should be easy to create and accessed within a collection.

Expected User Journey

I started defining a customer journey from planning to reflection, capturing actions and thoughts leading to fulfillment of user needs.

Here is the expected customer journey map I synthesized for our refined offerings. Hover to zoom.

Planning Stage

Let's go creates quality hikes efficiently based on user preferences.

It Informs hiker of challenges on the route before they choose a hike.

Experiencing Stage

Let's go has flexible navigation for spontaneity and exploration on a route.

Provides an interesting and unique route back home.

Reflecting Stage

Let's go includes geo-tagged audio-visual tools for meaningful codification of memories that can be shared with friends and family.

Service blueprint

Picking up from the customer journey, I led making of the service blueprint, to define the digital touch points, screens and invisible requirements.

Based on the key path from the journey may, I led the making of a service blueprint. Click to expand.

Making the Let's Go App

While my teammates defined the visual schema, I looked into user flows. We then whiteboarded and sketched screens in the key path.

Whiteboarding

With the flows in mind we began sketching shots layouts and UI screens. I was largely involved in the screens for hike suggestions, hike details and navigation.

Click here to go back up to the video and prototype!

Reflections & Learnings

If I had more time I would...

- Deep dive on accessibility in urban hikes.
- Look into building a community for urban hikers.

What went well?

- Differentiating between planning, experiencing and remembering phases helped us define them better. We referred to Kahneman's principles very often.

What could be better?

- We took a while to zero in on our problem space and could have benefitted from scoping it early on.