Hitch-A-Hike From City Living
As User Experience (UX) Designers, my team (Isabel Michaelides and Kara Snyder) and I were hired by General Assembly to choose any topic of interest and build a possible solution to any problem space within that topic. We chose to delve into the topic of nature and how the typical New York City resident interacts with immersive nature. Hence, Hitch-A-Hike was born.
Before we decided to research how city dwellers interact with immersive nature, my team and I started by creating a topic map to see where any issues would arise. We stretched the topic of nature from hiking all the way to types of weather. However, we could not get past the thought of, “If we’re going to be interviewing mostly New Yorkers, how are they going to perceive ‘nature’?” We then came to the idea of making that our problem space: How do city dwellers interact with nature?
After topic mapping, we created a screener survey and ended up interviewing six (6) individuals. These 6 individual users included two women and four men, ranging from 24–42 years old. All 6 individuals were New York City residents and had varying experiences in nature and varying ideas of what “real” nature is. Overall, these users said that “real” nature is where you can be fully immersed into green space. From these interviews, we created an affinity map of different points and quotes made by our users. In this map, we came up with different “I” statements that accurately represented our users. These “I” statements included the four statements we mainly ended up focusing on for our product: “I feel calmer in nature,” “I feel overwhelmed by city living,” “I live too far from nature,” and “I think having a car would give me easier access to nature.”
In the image above, we introduce you to Jacob — a 30-year-old history teacher in Brooklyn who likes to go hiking with friends but wishes he could go into nature more to escape city life and improve his mental wellbeing. After creating our affinity map, we were able to create this persona of Jacob. Jacob believes, “Walking down the street past a tree is not interacting with nature.” This persona of Jacob brought us to look into how he typically gets immersed in nature outside of the city.
At first, you can see that Jacob goes to a city park as a stopgap for “real” immersive nature and acknowledges that it does not give him the satisfaction of “real” nature. When his friend invites him to go into nature outside of the city, he gets excited but quickly realizes that it is time-consuming and expensive just to get to nature from the city. However, once he gets into nature, he points out that the hassle was worth it. For our research and development of our product, we decided to focus on the biggest pain point of the middle section of his journey where he is stressing over the time and cost of getting into nature.
After researching all of Jacob’s pain points, goals, needs, and behaviors, we came up with the following problem statement:
Jacob is overwhelmed by the busyness of modern city life and spending time in green space is restorative for him. How might we help Jacob overcome the distance and surround himself with green space more effortlessly?
With such a large problem space, we needed to narrow our focus to one specific problem. With Jacob and each of our 6 users all saying they have a hard time getting into nature because of transportation restraints, we decided to make a product that would help these city dwellers get to nature at an affordable rate — a product for ride sharing or carpooling into nature. But on what platform would we build this product?
We decided to make our carpooling product a native iOS mobile application. Though we found that our users use nature to disconnect from technology, people don’t bring their desktops hiking with them. They do, however, often have their phones on them at all times. Having a native mobile application also allows the user to receive push notifications from their drivers about their carpool as well as access offline information about their natural destinations.
From here, we proposed that we partner with Appalachian Mountain Club because of the vast amount of information they offer. They offer information for mountains and trails from Washington, D.C. to Maine. They have everything from trail maps to parking information. However, with all of this information, they do not have any way of getting people immersed into this nature. That’s where we would come in. Since we also do not have the data ourselves to provide to users about their natural destinations, we could partner with Appalachian Mountain Club and benefit both parties, creating an application that not only helps the environment through carpooling, but also gives user the information they need on their destination as well as a way to get there.
After choosing this platform and proposing this partnership, we needed to start thinking of features our future application would have. Since we did not interview our users about carpooling and ride sharing specifically, and we were pressed for time in our two-week sprint, we completed a competitive feature analysis and matrix to see how similar products and companies work as well as what was already familiar to users of ride share and carpool applications. In these analyses, we found that we are most similar in terms of target price and method of transportation (carpooling) to an application called BlaBlaCar, which is a driver-initiated carpooling application in over twenty-two countries excluding the United States. Through our feature analysis, we were able to see what features were commonly offered in popular and similar carpooling or ride sharing applications. This is how we implemented many of our features since we did not ask users about their experiences with similar applications. For instance, we saw that BlaBlaCar offers a “Ladies Only” feature where female riders can request to only have female drivers and we saw that as a very important safety feature and decided to make our own version for our application. We also found that no other applications offered information about natural destinations, which sets us apart from these other applications.
After completing this analysis, we went straight into a design studio and created our screens for our application. After coming up with wireframes, we jumped straight into Principle and started making our medium-fidelity (mid-fi) wireframes and prototype.
When we conducted usability tests on this prototype, we tested our product on three different users to check its usability. In these tests, users were overall able to successfully complete the tasks we gave them to complete. Our tasks for our users were as follows:
- You already have an account with Hitch-A-Hike. Search for carpools from Williamsburg, Brooklyn to Lake Placid, NY for two passengers.
- You want to choose a round trip carpool with a female driver. Show only those carpool options, and book your carpool.
- Learn more about hiking options about Lake Placid.
However, even with all of our prototype’s successes, we still faced some issues. For instance, most of our users felt uneasy by the “Close” button in the “Filters” Flyout Menu Screen, saying that they would feel better if it was a “Save” button so they would know for sure their filter settings would save and apply to their search. Also, our prototype only allowed a small scrolling window on the Destination Options Screen and one user continues to try to scroll from the center of the screen as if to scroll through the entire page through the entire screen.
Taking this feedback, we went right into the high-fidelity (hi-fi) mockup of Hitch-A-Hike, starting right away with solving some of the issues from the mid-fi wireframes. Adding color, image, and more design elements really helped our application come to life. Below are some screens from our hi-fi mockup:
Link to prototype: Link to mid-fi prototype: https://invis.io/9RTOXJAX4F2
We changed the “Close” button to a “Save” button on the “Filters” Flyout Menu as well made the entire Destination Options Screen scrollable. After we finished designing the high-fidelity mockup and prototype of our Hitch-A-Hike mobile application, we dove right into more usability tests, this time testing four different users. During these tests, we used the same tasks as we did in our mid-fi usability tests. Overall, every user was able to successfully complete all of the tasks we gave them. However, we still had a small issue. One user had issue figuring out how to close the “Filters” Flyout Menu — they were expecting the “Save” button to be at the bottom of the menu and not the top.
For our next steps as a team working on Hitch-A-Hike, we want to focus more on the driver’s side of the application since it is a driver-initiated carpooling application. We also want to conduct more user research and focus on solving the remaining issue in the “Filter” Flyout Menu. Additionally, we want to talk with our development team to get the Google Maps API integrated into the application for the driver’s sake, as well as to integrate Appalachian Mountain Club’s data into our application. Lastly, we also want to fully build out the application to be fully functional so users like Jacob can start getting more immersed into nature!
