REI’s New Social Networking feature, REI Climb.
Reimagining REI’s eCommerce site as a social networking opportunity and route planner for Climbers.
My Role(s)
Interaction Design| User Research | Visual Design | Sketching | Prototype Design
Tool(s)
Figma & Plugins | Maze | Photoshop
Project Length: 2 Weeks
Team Members: 4
Date: October 2022
About Project
“We believe a life outdoors is a life well-lived! We believe that it’s in the wild, untamed and natural places that we find out best selves, so our purpose
is to awaken a lifelong love of the outdoors, for all”
REI wants to be the #1 brand in the eyes of climbers. They plan to create a responsive site specifically for climbers, providing helpful information daily, regardless of whether the climber is climbing. Based on our Users’ and business needs, our team wanted to create an easy-to-use social feature and resource that climbers could implement in their climb-finding process to have a more enriched and safer climbing experience. Considering this new feature is being added to an established website, I felt it was important to stay within the rules of REI’s brand to create a seamless and familiar experience for established users learning a new feature.
Research
As a group, we broke off and conducted our User Interviews. We specifically wanted to target climbers varying in experience. We wanted to see if we could add anything that would be an essential tool for new and more seasoned climbers and if any issues overlapped. After the interview process concluded, we sorted the information gathered into categories based on their relationships through Affinity Mapping.
There were quite a few common trends between interviewees, but the two that stood out most were users “relying on multiple apps to find climbs” and how “climbing fills that social need as well as provides a sense of community.” With the User Interviews in mind and the Affinity Map, we created our User Persona, representing our users’ critical needs for which our feature will provide a solution.
After synthesizing who our User is and their needs, the next course of action was doing our competitive analysis. We wanted to see what our competitors are good at, what they are lacking, and where we could feel a gap. Considering this is a new feature that acts differently from the rest of the primary site e-commerce function, we thought it was appropriate to conduct a competitive analysis against sites/apps that could potentially be their competitors, which were also sites commonly mentioned by our Users during our Interviews. The sites/apps that were mentioned were:
Mountain Projetct: A resource for climbers to help find route and offers advice from fellow climbers.
- Detailed “Route Finder” with multiple criteria
- Suggested climbs with ratings
- weather tracker
Strava: Social Network for Athletes.
- Record activity and sharing workouts
- Follow Athletes (friends/followers)
- leave comments on activities.
All Trails: Trail guides, Camping sites, all around resource for outdoor recreational activities with info for over 300,000 Trails.
- Community Feed that updates periodically to keep up with friends’ adventures.
- Recommending Top attractions in a given area based on geolocation.
- save favorite Trails
Design Process
We wanted to create an easy-to-use social feature and climbing resource that climbers could implement in their climb-finding process to have a more enriched and safer climbing experience. Carefully considering our Competitive analysis and keeping our User Persona in mind, I sketched how the new feature would look in a mobile setting. Elements we felt were essential to implement according to our User were:
- Social feature (Find Friends/Add Friends)
- Messaging
- News feed
- Weather updates
- Record Activity
- Route Description
- Save Route for Future
We tasked our 13 Users to find a difficult climbing route using our Lo-Fi design in a Usability Test. We wanted to determine if the pathway we created was helpful and intuitive and offered an easy user experience. We also wanted to determine if any challenges in the design need our immediate attention.
The results of that were overwhelmingly positive.
Though our Users successfully navigated the lo-fi prototype, we wanted to fine-tune our feature to simplify the quality further. So we discovered the issue of our poor average in terms of misclick rate.
Problem:
The data collected suggested that there may have been too many options readily accessible for the user to choose from, which made them search for alternative routes, which may slow the route-finding process down and potentially made for a poor User Experience. Considering we are making good user experiences, I went back to the drawing board to simplify the options further.
Solution:
I replaced the five-button advance search option from our lo-fi prototype with two buttons, one serving as a filter and the other a sort-by option. The Filter now opens from the left, revealing all detailed search criteria from location to types of climbs a User may be interested in.
The sort-by option now opens as a pop-up, allowing you to organize the filter results according to what the User finds the most important.
Conclusion & Takeaway
The immediate next steps would be to continue User Testing and iteration on the current hi-fi prototype. Since there are indoor climbers, I would like to add “Indoor Climbing” options to search for or join a gym. I would also like the new REI Climb feature to recommend gear and connect back to the e-commerce section of the site so users can purchase recommended equipment as they plan for the climb.
If you’ve made it this far, thank you so much for reading my case study! I’m new to UI/UX, and this is my first post on Medium.