Veterans' Day Weekend Design Sprint, Part 1

An app for hikers to find a carpool to trail heads

Planning phase: features, structure, layout

Problem: Hikers without cars want rides to trail heads and hikers with cars want company and help paying for gas.

Part social app, part service app. My goal for this project is to work on improving and showing my visual design skills. I will be using pen and paper, Adobe XD to make prototypes and Adobe Illustrator to make flow charts and site map.

My research is based on comments written by individuals on a Facebook group: PNW Outdoor Women Group. In many posts, women write about how they are tired of hiking alone or how not having hiking partners prevents them from going out to enjoy the extensive amount of trails in the region.

Plan: to make an app to help people find other hike-minded people with an emphasis on community, sharing and safety.

As I started sketching out a user flow, I already came up with some pain points: gas bill tracking and paying integration, user safety, reviewing people, should there be a groups option, etc. Some pain points like, should payment calculator be in profile or in messaging can probably be answered through user testing. Others, like group options and safety/ reviewing people features should be ironed out before.

First user flow and point points sketch.

I wanted to set up a lean IA frame so as to reduce confusion between all the features I had planned. I started by doing a quick affinity mapping of features I already had in mind:

Already such a mess!

I wanted to write this down as a site map.

Lots of revisions still…

I went back to creating user flows and layout sketches for each of the four identified categories: News feed, Profile, Messaging, Browsing. This helped iron out the site map even more, but also allowed me to work out some features I had been unsure of.

Now, next day is black/white/gray wire frame making. There are a lot of screens to make, so this will probably take more than a day to do. I also want to create design patterns and UI elements for one of the processes. I think the sign-in set up would be fun to make look pretty.

Latest/ Revised Site Map