When I came across the ‘Trekking’ topic through some of my friends, I realized that very less tools were available for the aid of trekkers. This is what triggered design thinker in me to address the problem.

As it was an independent project, I was the sole person involved in carrying out the design process. I played the role of researcher, UX designer, UX writer, on & on. Sometime to uncover and understand different aspects of my idea, I was discuss it with my friend who is a UX designer, Which help me lots to divers the thinking & challenge my assumptions.

Even in this digital era, finding a trek or planning a hike is still a difficult task to do. My goal was to design a product that will offer seamless trip planning & reliable information to trekkers who are always up for new adventures.

Wanderr is an app that can be used by trekkers/wanderers for exploring treks/trips,  joining trek events, & getting reliable information for planning a trek including routes. The app can also be used by trekkers to connect with other trekkers and share updates & experiences with the community.

I navigated the whole project through 4 stages of my design process. Understand, Define, Conceptualize, Design were the four phases under which I executed various UX methodologies  to achieve the deliverables.

After starting the project, the first thing I did was to learn about users & their goals/needs. Also, I had to get known with the context of trekking, trip planning, the existing solutions, and interacting with users.

I applied User Research techniques such as User Interviews, Surveys & Market Research to get a hold of the whole scenario.

I interviewed two trekkers with varying expertise in the trekking-trips stuff. My interaction questions were focused on uncovering information about how the whole thing works. This gave me a good headstart about where to look & how to proceed to the next stages.

    ‘Trek planning is more difficult than the actual trek itself’. -Participant Trekker

To get a clearer picture & refined insights to work upon, a user survey was conducted. The questionnaire for the survey was based on the insights learned from the prior interviewees.

This is the thing that I used throughout the process, but as I started it earlier, it seems right to place it in the first phase. I studied the existing solutions used for planning trek/trip events. 

Major players in the market being AllTrails, Komoot & ViewRanger. I studied their structure, service & user reviews to understand the baseline.

In this second phase, I defined users, their needs, and their goals. I analyzed the data obtained from the first phase & then worked on the touchpoints. User Personas were formed followed by Customer Journey Map to illustrate the users' goals, actions & experiences.

Based on the research done, I formed three distinct personas whose goals revolved around the same context but had different needs & goals.

People looking for trek event in the neighborhood: Monica

People seeking information about locations & routes to plan the trek: John

Trek planners looking for a wider audience base: Sunil

Based on the data sampled and study compiled in the personas, I mapped out the customer journey map based on how my product will turn out to be for the respective users.

I included triggers in the first step of CJM to actually indicate the contextual reference of the individual'. Emotional mapping across each touchpoint has been displayed on the map.

As the name suggests, this phase included conceptualizing the solutions to the touchpoints defined through the previous two stages. I went through brainstorming, heuristics, sitemaps, & lots of rough sketching.

CJM gave a thorough definition of each persona’s interaction for getting the desired experience. I drew multiple iterations of the site map which will be harmonious to the needs of all three persona needs.

Creating a seamless, unobtrusive experience was the forefront goal while preparing the site map.

In this last phase, I compiled all the information obtained from the previous three phases and put them together to form a design. 

Paper prototyping took a considerable amount of effort as designing just the right features & interactions was a high priority. I was being highly aware of the UX guidelines,

Using prototyping tools, I built the prototype for the concept. It took a considerable amount of time and iterations to settle down on a ‘Good Enough’ design.

The beta testing of the product was done through few interested candidates and they appreciated the idea behind the product. When asked about the interaction, they felt it just like another app. (in their opinion, there weren't major flaws).

This project took me through a rigorous learning experience. 

As observed during user research, trekkers were using chat apps the most to communicate with groups, so I integrated that feature in the design.

I learned to follow Visual Hierarchy by prioritizing the content to be displayed first. This was achieved by referring to the user goals & needs from the journey map.

At each stage of the design process, I had to remind myself to stick to the ‘User-Centered Approach’ by avoiding 'Unconscious Bias'.

I completed this project to implement UX skills to solve a problem that I & many others genuinely faced. I took guidance from various mentors & resources. IBM Enterprise design Thinking Practitioner ​​​​​​​as well as User Experience Designer by ImaginXP was a big guidance on this journey.