Misk Project 3: Bhaiya Adventures
Let’s design an experience for sports activities in Abha!
Almost halfway through the program and it was time for project 3!
I am not going to lie this project might be the most overwhelming, stressful, yet fun project I have ever done.
To start off we were introduced to our challenge which was designing an experience for sports activities in the beautiful city of Abha. When I discovered what our challenge was I was especially worried about not finding information about sports activities in Abha. However, I was pleasantly surprised by how much information I found online!
Then it was time to know who my group mates were, Alanoud, Lamia, Manar, and Mohammed
and I couldn't ask for a better team!
In this project, we had two phases: 1- Research 2- Design
phase 1: research (warning it’s long but very crucial)
I started it off with the generative research and we divided it into two sections: 1- Desk Research 2-Experts Research
for the desk research, I first wanted to get some general information about the city of Abha and according to Welcome Saudi & Visit Saudi :
- One of Abha’s main attractions is its mild climate.
- Most of the time the temperature in Abhe doesn’t rise above 35C.
- The most common sports activities in Abha are hiking and mountain climbing.
Next, we wanted to find out more about the trends in Abha and we found that Interest in Abha always spikes around July and August and most of Abha’s visitors are Saudi locals.
After that, I started laying out the areas in Abha and matching them to the sports activity
and this really helped with organizing the areas with corresponding sports activities.
Then pinned the areas on the map just to get an idea of the distances and how far the areas are from central Abha
Finally, for the generative research, we interviewed 2 tour guides in Abha,
Mohammed and Abdulbari, and said :
- Saudi Government is encouraging the use of tour guides
- Young Saudis are the most that visit Abha for sports activities
- Tourists mainly visit Abha in the summer
- People do sports activities for nature mainly but also for the history
and with that, we conclude our generative research 🎊
now we move to our user research!
Target audience: People interested in going to Abha and are willing to try out adventurous sports
Age: mid 20’s the to mid-'30s
Gender : Male & Female
we did our screener based on our target audience and our screener goals were:
- To find and interview people living / interested in going to Abha and are willing to try out adventurous sports
- To better understand the basic preferences of our users
- To get a better understanding of our persona
and below is the screener results
Next, we moved on to our interviews where we interviewed 29 people (shout out to Alanoud for being our own Oprah Winfrey)
and our interview goals were:
1- To identify the users’ current knowledge about Abha
2- To identify the most desired places in Abha
3- To identify the pain points/ struggles when looking for sports activities while traveling
4- To better understand the behaviors/attitudes of the user towards adventure tourism
5- Identifying our competitors
6- To decide whether to develop an app or a website
7- Identifying the users’ needs
8- Identifying the persona
and oh did we get a lot of data points that needed sorting out which takes us to our affinity mapping
I know it’s huge …which is why we summarized the most important findings and insights :
Now it's to introduce our persona, Rashid!
I loved working on the persona it was so much fun imaging the personality of Rashid and how our solution would help him
next was our storyboard which we did in an animation form
and this is Rashid’s retrospective user journey :
and with that, we are done with our user research!
Next, we move on to business research (my favorite part !)
we defined our competitors which were
1-google maps, 2- wikiloc, 3-Tripadvisor,4-hala Yalla, 5- Salalah adventures, 6-Pangaea,7-Suplift, 8- Yellowstone park, and 9- Yosemite park
and then started our C&C analysis :
and got the following recommendations :
- Provide enough info about the activity (the place, age, fees, what to bring, etc)
- Provide a visual map
- Add multiple images of the place from different angles
- Suggest nearby activities
- A full explanation of sports activities.
Then we did the Heuristic evaluation:
and also market positioning
and the takeaways were :
- Most of our competitors offer a wide variety of sports activities but differ when it comes to planning
- We understood where our competitors lie in terms of variety and planning
- Determined where we lie
From there we move to our problem statement :
Active adults have a problem that they fear for their safety and face difficulties finding accurate information in one place when wanting to do sports activities in Abha. Our solution will act as a guide to help users make informed decisions and reassure their safety whiles performing the activities.
About our solution :
we also decided to create an app because :
1- The Internet is good according to our user research and experts
2- Users use smartwatches/phones during the activity for:- tracking steps- tracking heart rate-calculates distance, time, and calories
3-Users can get notifications when a booking slot becomes free, changes in weather and a landmark is near
and that finally! concludes our research phase 🥳
Phase 2: design phase
In this phase, I learned so much from my teammates about UI their creativity and attention to detail really opened my eyes to things i would have never considered
I started this phase with the user flow and task flow attached below
Next, was the Sitemap and we focused on 5 main pages which were: 1- home 2- my plan 3-explore (includes the overall map of Abha ) 4- chat 5-profile
After that, we started developing the design system and determining the logo, color palette , typography , card design, and button shapes, and establishing a system majorly helped with the consistency of the wireframes 🤩
Speaking of wireframes let’s show our annotated med-fi wireframes!
After finishing the user testing I started doing the user testing
and the testing was done on 5 people in person and asked them to do the following task:
Task: Add a hiking activity and book a tour guide
Step 1: Log in as a guest and fill out the survey
Step 2: Pick the hiking activity and choose “Al Souda”
Step 3: Read all the safety, preparation info, and reviews
Step 4: Add the activity to plan
Step 5: Book a guide
Step 6: Book a tour guide
Step 7: Return to the homepage
and got the following results :
From we here we move to the Hi-Fi video🎊
Lastly, I wanna share the next steps i wanna take in regards of progressing our project :
- Tour guides interface
- Tackle different primary and secondary personas
- Gamification for encouraging doing events
- Arabic interface
- Purchase clothing and equipment directly from the app
- Allow tour guides to customize prices based on each customer
Final thoughts 💬
I wanna say that this project really challenged my skills to a new level from the complexity of the challenge to the numerous things that I learned from my teammates I genuinely feel like I developed as a UX designer
I wanna give a special shout-out to AlAnoud Bindayel, Lamia Alamr , Manar Alghamdi, and, Mohammad Al Ramis who made this project so much more fun from the fighting/negotiations to the countless irrelevant convo in the middle of very stressful work I will cherish these moments and I hope you are as proud as I am of what we have done!🤍
