Projects
My team and I shared 2 passions: Hiking and gaming. We decided that we wanted to create an app that could combined those two hobbies. We wanted to create a product that would gamify hiking while also being a great tool to help new hikers get into the pastime, and thus the idea of Take a Hike! was born.
We interviewed 5 avid hikers asking why they enjoy that hobby, tools they use, and any common pain points they experience. Here's what we learned:
To finish off the ideation stage, we created a prioritization matrix to gauge which ideas would be the most beneficial to add.
While one part of our team was synthesizing the data, another group performed a competitor analysis to see what our potential competition is succeeding and what we could improve upon their ideas. Here’s what we came up with:
Because of the nature of this project, my team and I opted to not use the modern minimalist style. This is because, while we enjoy that aesthetic, we felt that this app gave us a a chance to try styling something more unique. While a lot of our color pallet came from ideas of nature, we wanted to bring out a cartoon-like aesthetic and feel for our users. Using Disney's Toontown as an inspiration, we chose Impress BT and Minnie as our main fonts.
Because no one on my team were capable artist, we could not perfectly create the stylized app we envisioned. To supplement that issue, we used Midjourney, the image generating AI, to create the backgrounds and icons for us.
With our mid-fidelity version of the app, we presented a 5 different individuals with our creation to test the functionality of our product. Although none of the testers had any major issues navigating or using the app, we decided to do an overhaul of the current design. This is because after watching our testers navigate the menus we designed, we realized we failed to capture the cartoon-like style we wanted. To fix that, we redesigned many of the menus to have reduced clutter and also make the other menus feel more lively.
This was a unique project experience for my team and I. This was the first time we got to design something that wasn't in the modern minimalist aesthetic. It was more challenging than I expected, but I wouldn't mind doing more stuff like this in the future. Time constraints also a massive limiting factor on how far we got in this project. There were a lot of ideas we wanted to add from our prioritization matrix, but because we only had just under 3 weeks to complete the project, we could not fit in all our ideas. Instead, we decided to focus on the main flow of the game, which was finding and playing the game.
Another issue we had with this project occurred during the research phase. During ideation, we realized that we had the wrong target group for our research. While the information we learned from avid hikers was valuable, I feel that we could have gotten better information from players of navigation games. This way, we could understand the exact appeal of those types of games and cater to them.