Hitch-A-Hike: Connecting New Yorkers to Nature
Overview
The problem space for this project — nature and New Yorkers — was expansive and reflective of the backgrounds and common interests of our team of UX Designers. What evolved from our design process was Hitch-A-Hike. It’s a native, iOS mobile app for carpooling New York City residents into nature and providing them information about their natural destination and outdoor activities.
Problem Statement
New York City dwellers have limited access to fully immersive experiences in nature and often use city parks as a stopgap between trips outside the city.
They are overwhelmed by the busyness of modern city life and spending time in green space is restorative for them. How might we help New Yorkers overcome the distance and surround themselves with green space more effortlessly?
Users & Audience
Overall, the ideal users for the Hitch-A-Hitch are New York City residents who crave more immersive experiences surrounded by green space. When they are limited by time or distance, they are primarily visiting city parks as a stopgap for their preferred, more immersive experiences. This happens on weekends either alone or with close friends and family.
These New Yorkers are frequently overwhelmed by city living. It’s often difficult for them to carve out time to travel to natural destinations. However, they experience immense sense of peace and calm when they are able to disconnect in nature.
They believe that having a car would provide them easier access to natural destinations outside of NYC and primarily use Google Maps to identify green spaces.
Roles & Responsibilities
For this project, we were a team of 3 UX Design immersive students at General Assembly. It was a conceptual project with internal agency stakeholders. Most of the work was done onsite in New York.
As part of our research, we identified Mountain Club as a possible strategic partner.
Scope & Constraints
Time was the biggest constraint for this project. It was a 15-day sprint including weekends. (Additionally, one of those weekends was a holiday weekend with multiple team members traveling/working remotely.)
Initially, we were given a lot of latitude in determining our problem space. We ultimately found ourselves wanting to explore how New Yorkers interact with nature. In part, this was to challenge ourselves to explore a topic that collectively interested us, but outside of or adjacent to our individual areas of expertise. (Creating a topic map helped us consider our options.) Our team’s choice was also very much motivated by the time constraint. We felt NYC was enough of a large, diverse market to explore, but still be manageable with the time we had.
Regarding budget, it wasn’t a factor because this was a client-simulated project.
Identifying our Problem Space
After aligning our common interests and moving outside of our areas of expertise, we used a topic map to start visualizing a potential problem space for nature/outdoors. It’s unlikely we’d have this much freedom again. Yet, this helped us decide on a possible problem space as well as start to get to know each other as a team.
User Research
Collecting qualitative data through user interviews is one of the most fundamental (and my favorite) part of the design process. This is the foundation that the rest of work rests on.
We used a screener survey to isolate New York City residents, but stayed open to various ages and frequency of interaction with nature. Based on the results, we identified the following 6 users to interview:
All of the interviews, except one by phone, were conducted in-person. Knowing the quality of data we gathered at this stage would be integral to the rest of our process, we designed the following questions as a common starting place:
· How do you define ‘interacting with nature’?
· How frequently have you interacted with nature in past month?
· Does time of day, week, month, or year affect how much you interact with nature?
· On a scale of 1–5, 1 being ‘not at all’ and 5 being ‘totally satisfied,’ how satisfied are you with the amount you interact with nature?
· What do these interactions with nature look like for you?
· Where are these interactions with nature happening for you?
· What does being in/around nature do for you?
· Do you generally plan to interact with nature? If yes, how? What resources do you use?
· Is interacting with nature something you do solo or with others?
· What obstacles do you face trying to interact with nature as a city dweller?
The power of following these questions up with a why (or more than one) should not be understated.
Synthesis
We chose to use an affinity map to synthesize our data.
What insights emerged from the perspective of our users was pretty fascinating:
· I disconnect when I’m in nature.
· I like to visit parks when I’m in the city.
· I go to parks on the weekend.
· I don’t make enough time to be in nature.
· I think being in nature is being surrounded by green.
· I interact with nature differently by season.
· I use Google Maps to find nature.
· I interact with nature alone or with close friends and family.
· I feel calmer in nature.*
· I feel overwhelmed by city living.*
· I live too far from nature.*
· I think having a car would give me easier access to nature.*
[*Take special note of these last four I statements because they become significant inspiration when we moved into the ideation phase of this project.]
From these I statements and the user research, a user persona, Jacob, and a journey map of his experience interacting with nature emerged. Meet Jacob.
Creating both of these deliverables really helps provide a common understanding and forge a deeper understanding of the user. The Research & Planning phase of Jacob’s journey provided the most opportunity to create a more satisfying experience for him within the time constraints of our sprint.
With Jacob and his journey firmly in mind, we began to narrow our problem space and focus our efforts. We did this by coming up with a clear problem statement:
City dwellers have limited access to fully immersive experiences in nature and often use city parks as a stopgap between trips outside the city.
Jacob is overwhelmed by the busyness of modern city life and spending time in green space is restorative for him. How might we help Jacob overcome the distance and surround himself with green space more effortlessly?
Ideation & Delivery
When it came time to ideate, we pulled what we learned about Jacob forward. Remember those four I statements? As a team, here’s a distillation of how what we were thinking:
With carpooling emerging as a potential solution in our nature problem space, we needed to make a decision on platform choice. Jacob isn’t hiking or swimming with his laptop. While he prefers to disconnect while in nature with close family and friends, he does bring along his iPhone. Creating a native, mobile iOS app became the obvious choice. It would also allow for push notifications with his driver and allow for offline access to outdoor activity and destination information he’d need.
But who has that natural destination data? Integrating the Google Maps API would help deliver the address and driving destination, but our app’s specialization would be nature. We identified the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) as proposed partner.
· AMC’s core mission is to connect people with outdoor activities from the Mid-Atlantic through the Northeast (driving distance of NYC)
· Our app, Hitch-A-Hike, could help transport their member to their events, especially for their New York chapter
· AMC sits on a mountain of data from their offerings: online advice, online trip planning (by state or activity), printed guidebooks, maps, and magazines
Wanting to understand where Hitch-A-Hike could potentially fit into the market, we did some research and synthesized the results in this competitive matrix.
What we found was that our focus on nature was a major point of differentiation. Also, our pricing — estimated based on driver-initiated carpooling giant, BlaBlaCar — was not the cheapest, but still quite competitive.
As we got closer to going into the design studio, we started to think about features that might be important to Jacob. Due to the time it would take to conduct more user interviews on carpooling and synthesize the data, we opted to create the competitive feature analysis below:
This helped us understand which features Jacob (and our other users) would likely expect. This analysis and a MoSCoW Map also helped us prioritize which features we must and should focus on for this sprint. Interestingly, none of our competitors offer natural destination and outdoor activity information. This reinforced what could be a significant competitive advantage.
We took all of this research into our design studio. While the initial sketches aren’t so pretty, this is when the Hitch-A-Hike app really began to take shape. Because of the time constraints, we focused on Jacob’s journey as the passenger. We assumed he was registered and logged into the app.
Coming out of the studio, we constructed this mid-fidelity wireframe. (One of my teammates took the lead in transforming our hand-drawn sketches using Sketch. The other spearheaded the high-fidelity mockup creation.)
· Conducting our usability tests with 3 users was quite successful:
3/3 users were able to successfully search for carpools from Williamsburg, Brooklyn to Lake Placid, NY for two passengers.
· 3/3 users were able to successfully filter the ride results to find a female driver doing a round trip and request the carpool.
· 3/3 users were able to successfully find destination information about hiking at Lake Placid.
However, we did note some minor opportunities for improvement that we chose to integrate into the high-fidelity mockup.
After integrating these changes, here are the annotated versions of our high-fidelity mockup for a more robust understanding of the Hitch-A-Hike app:
Outcome
Ultimately, we did create a solution to help Jacob overcome the distance and surround himself with green space more effortlessly. Additionally, we were able to help him mitigate the expense through carpooling.
Next steps would include:
· In the high-fidelity mockup, 1/4 users could not close out of the Filters menu because they were expecting the button to be at the bottom of the page. Explore this through more usability testing.
· Consult with development team about integration of the Google Maps API and Appalachian Mountain Club data
· Create and test a mid-fidelity wireframe and conduct usability testing for the rest of the app.
· Conduct card sorting for the content of the Menu screen.
· Create the high-fidelity mockup for the entire app.
Things I would consider doing differently next time:
· Conduct another round of user interviews after deciding to move in the direction of carpooling to better understand user habits and mindset, specifically around carpooling.
· While overall we had very successful mid-fidelity usability tests, I want to consider testing with paper prototypes more on future projects. It’s faster and will be cheaper when budget is a factor.
