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Mount is an app which makes planning hikes effortless, while also ensuring safety and boosting confidence during a mountain hike. No more uncertainty, feeling hopeless, or finding yourself lost on a trail; Mount is full of features designed to meet needs of hiking enthusiasts.
Mountain hikers get lost on trails and have issues with navigating main points. No internet access, lack of knowledge about the conditions, and poorly marked trails do not make the situation easy.
…create an accessible digital solution, so that people feel confident, safe and in control while they are hiking?
iOS/Android – users will be using this app mostly while on the trail or on the go often without internet connection.
Mountain hikers get lost on trails and have issues with navigating main points. No internet access, lack of knowledge about the conditions, and poorly marked trails do not make the situation easy.
…create an accessible digital solution, so that people feel confident, safe and in control while they are hiking?
iOS/Android – users will be using this app mostly while on the trail or on the go often without internet connection.
I spent some time reading reviews of existing hiking apps to understand why those products are not enough. Then I downloaded the apps and tried them out myself, confirming the pains that other users wrote about.
The recurring issues across all the apps were:
1. Unfriendly and not-intuitive interface.
2. Important spots like campsites missing.
3. Lack of crucial features like finding the path from the current location, saving concurred trails, path updates.
1. Clean, user-friendly interface that will allow flawless use of the app.
2. Easy way to navigate between campsites, water spots, shelters.
3. Up to date information on the hiking paths.
1. Clean, user-friendly interface that will allow flawless use of the app.
2. Easy way to navigate between campsites, water spots, shelters.
3. Up to date information on the hiking paths.
The purpose of the research and possible outcomes:
In order to gain better insights and learn from real people, I conducted: Qualitative Research (Interview, 6 people interviewed) and Quantitative Research (Anonymous Survey, 50 participants).
After I had the results of the research I headed to Miro and created boards where I collected all the essential findings.
Summing up the pain points from the interview with icons, highlights the biggest problems.
When it comes to the survey I decided to create categories and group all the findings. This allowed me to visually understand the crucial pain points, to see the weight of each problem.
Navigation and information about the paths was one of the biggest issues in both the survey and interview. People that hike in mountains often face problems such as bad signage on the path, lack of reliable offline and online maps, and missing information on the conditions about the trails they are interested in.
To relate better to the potential users and understand their needs I created 4 personas. This step allowed me to gain a deeper understanding of their situations, preferences and struggles. According to the research the potential users are between 25-35 years old, they are all tech savvy and enjoy easy to moderate hiking paths. Meet Lena, Lucas, Anneliese and Paul.
It’s crucial to have a reliable source of information about trails in one place that will make planning and hike easy, making people feel safe and confident.
The Mount app plays the crucial part in both the planning and the hike phase, ensuring the comfort and peace of mind of the users.
During the planning phase, Lena has issues with finding cohesive information on trails in the area of the trip. Mount app would be a viable and accessible solution to the planning needs that users have.
The hike phase shows how crucial the app is in ensuring the safety of users while they are on holiday in mountains.
Lena loves hiking and hikes very often. Even with that she is facing problems when it comes to finding cohesive information on hiking areas, not providing her with enough information to fully plan the hike.
Below you can find cuts from Lena’s journey that reveal some very important pain points.
– missing information on websites that would allow smooth and easy planning (validation of the Mount app);
– lack of trust in apps like Mount due to her bad previous experience (not reliable, missing crucial updates and information, not intuitive);
– she cannot find any information on areas that allow the entry with a dog;
– she gets lost and does not know how to find her way back which is extremely dangerous in mountains.
Lucas hikes at least 3 times a year. As Lena he has issues with finding cohesive information on hiking areas, but also has trouble with keeping track on places he already visited.
Below you can find cuts from Lucas journey that reveal some very important pain points.
– missing information on websites that would allow smooth and easy planning (validation of the Mount app);
– he does not have a good system to track previous trips;
– he has the sound on his phone off, missing crucial notifications from the app;
Main pain points based on all user journeys:
1. Users question the reliability of hiking apps.
2. Users cannot remember all the places they visited so far.
3. While users are on the hike, they do not constantly look at their phone. They might miss out on crucial trial condition updates if the sound on their phone is not on.
4. Some users like to plan not just the next trip to mountains but the ones that will come after that. They are missing the option to have all the future hiking trip ideas stored.
Goals
Reviews/notes – keep users confident about the app by allowing other users to confirm the information provided by the app.
History – allow users to keep information on their previous hikes.
Notifications – keep users updated about important changes while they hike (smart watch, sound on (on the phone) while hiking).
Planning – allow users to plan and organize their future hikes.
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I focused on three different stages of the user journey:
– planning the hiking trip
– the beginning of the hike
– facing the problematic situation on the trail (different for each persona).
Analyzing Lena’s feelings and thoughts during three different stages of her journey allowed me to validate that ensuring safety and comfort of users is crucial and should be the main focus of the app.
Lena likes to explore wild paths and areas, but that can often go wrong. The Mount app in situations like this one, becomes life-saving.
It’s important for Lucas to have control over his hikes, from making sure he will have enough water to finding shelter when the weather fails. The app ensures he will find what he’s looking for whenever he needs.
By understanding the potential problems on a deeper level, I realized that the most important part for hikers is to feel safe and confident while on the trail. The ease of use and the reliability of the app are crucial to ensure they feel that way.
The next step was to look once more at the research findings, personas, user journeys and empathy maps and gather all the important pain points and questions that users might face planning or while on the trail.
I decided to group them into categories, thinking already about the potential architecture of the product. This first draft helped me to gain a better understanding of how the app might look like.
After a lot of research the time came to determine what people, want, need, and desire in a hiking app. After going though all the findings I created a list of all the potential features the app could include.
The next step was to perform card sorting test to understand and determine the app’s structure and hierarchy. 10 people participated in the test. Below you will find the three outcomes that show how people decided to cluster the functions.
Creating a clear and easy to navigate experience is crucial for the user to keep using the app and be satisfied. I knew that the path to starting the hike has to be as linear as possible.
Once the cart sorting test was concluded and user flow analyzed, I created an app map to reinforce the features of the app, outline any possible problems, and get a bigger view at how the app will be constructed.
Sketching out the interface designs helped me to clarify, and narrow down the functions and flow of the app.
Below you can see wireframes from Discover, Map, Hikes and Profile pages. They show how the exploration, creating hikes, starting hikes and finding friends work like.
Tip: click on the image to be able to zoom in to see the details. 🙂
The initial idea was to have favourites page where the user can save all the attractive points and include saved hikes in the profile section. After deliberation and reviewing the main goals of the app I replaces the favourites with hikes, and place favourited points in the profile section of the app.
Hikes section is one of the most important points, this is why the user should be able to find them within just one step. Creating a whole separate page just for favourites seemed to be too much and moving them to profile section, while giving the spotlight to hikes seemed like the best solution.
I designed a few icons for the Hikes page in the bottom navigation menu, and then narrowed down to two. To make the final decision I run the preference test. 32 people participated and 85% voted for the version 1, making the choice clear.
The initial design did include the option to schedule the hike and an internal calendar, but after developing the details I realized this function is futile and just over complicates the Mount app.
The decision to remove that function did not seem to take away from the app, but made it clearer and easier to navigate.
Some people in the survey mentioned that the lack of company while they hike is an issue and that they would like to have an opportunity to find people that are interested in hiking with them.
This is why I decided to include the option to share the hikes with friends or make them public and allow people to join. The feature however was worrying me from the start and making me uncomfortable. The idea of meeting strangers in mountains, that sometimes are not very crowded seemed dangerous.
I decided to consult some of the potential users, and they agreed that that they would be too scared to use this feature and that they do not think it’s a safe solution. This is why I decided to keep an option to share the hikes with friends (without details like when the user plans to go), but delete the function that allows strangers to see/join trips.
A big turn happened when I asked potential users about the design of the photos on discovery page. 32 people took part in the preference test and the results were 50-50.
Version 1
Version 2
I decided to dive deeper, and read carefully all the comments people left where they backed their decision. It turned out they all liked the version 1 visually, but version 2 was more readable. I decided to improve version 1, by making the text background darker and photos bigger to ensure the easy use of the app.
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