Mobile App for Climbers
Concept project
Standalone App
2.5 weeks
3 UX Designers
UX Designer
Challenge
This project was created as a part of the bootcamp. We had only 2 weeks to solve a realistic design problem: create a solution for climbers to stay informed and connected.
Goals
- Attract new users to the platform
- Introduce climbers to the new features seamlessly
- Make a connection with REI e-commerce activity
Discovery
Questionnaire
Since neither of us had any climbing experience and climbers in our personal network, we decided to get a first-look at the common practices and tendencies of climbing through questionnaire which helped us to narrow the field of research and form a basis for subsequent user interviews.
We gathered 60 responses and found out:
97%
respondents climb with others
88%
respondents climb indoors
42%
climbers learn via Online Search
User Interviews
Then we dug deeper into gathered data and wanted to understand the user's journey of climbing and preparation for it and discover pain points of climbing through user interviews.
After 9 user interviews we found out:
Climbing indoors and climbing outdoors are 2 different journeys.
Communication with other climbers is a key aspect in climbing.
Climbing appears as a competitive sport where people want to become better.
Competitive Analysis
After knowing climbers wants and needs, we were looking for more insights about industry standards of digital solutions for climbers and already functioning experience with features we were going to add through competitive analysis.
Through analyzing feature inventory of 3 direct competitors and existing REI app we found out that all apps include:
Account dashboard to store users info
Several options to navigate: search bar, routes finder, menu, maps
UGC through reviews, ratings that can grow into community
Definition
Option 1: I sketched a few ideas after the my research. First option we explored was to integrate a climbing community tab into existing app: to us it seemed the most easiest and cost-effective solution but it was limiting our project since we would need to place all features within existing ones - this was figured out by creating a new site map (on the 2nd pic).
Option 2: Second option we explored was to create a standalone community app for climbers combining features synthesized throughout the research and REI existing brand guidelines.
Prototype
After a consultation with our bootcamp instructors and team brainstorming session I recommended to test with option 2, because we have figured out that e-commerce & community features conflict with each other and combining might be confusing.
With e-commerce feature the main goal is to purchase the product where as our solution was centered around learning and communication.
Keeping in mind these observations, we decided to go with a separate app powered by REI - REI Climbing.
Usability Testing
We were interested in understanding:
1. How users will perceive a standalone app?
2. Will users intuitively use new features starting from the landing page?
We went for un-moderated usability tests to discover more user insights from climbers communities by placing links to the usability test in the climbing communities.
Usability test findings:
This way we completed 36 tests and found out:
Users didn’t intuitively understand the route preview screen - 42% success rate
Users faced some issues on the forum when finding an article and saving the post - 54% success rate
Design
Iterations
After our usability testing, we figured out that uploading process needs to be more flexible for artists needs, so we decided to make the background display optional and to ensure consistency across Art in Res, we took the guesswork away from sizing and made it an auto generated response.
The artist will enter the dimensions of their piece and a background will display that is the appropriate size.
2nd round of usability testing
I suggested to go for another round since we were not satisfied with the previous usability test results, and we had a solid improvement:
Save Forum Post - 86% success rate
Find A Climb - 92% success rate
Final Designs
Results
To evaluate how users would use our live version of the app we set the following set of UX metrics: time to complete the task, task success rate, and users satisfaction for 3 user flows that we were working on:
Engage with community on Forum
Find a climb
Track your progress in Dashboard
We couldn’t measure an attitudinal set of metrics because we didn’t have an environment for it since the nature of a concept project.