General 3 — CELLHAZE

Summit

Camping Supplies App

Prompt: Design A Web App for Camping Supplies Brand

I was given a set of predefined user personas for this project. I decided that I wanted to make my target audience young adults since I felt like more seasoned campers, hikers, etc would already be familar with big brands in the industry and may not be looking for a new app or brand. For personal experience, I know a lot of young people who are interested in camping and aren’t sure where to start. Since I wouldn’t be getting a definite response from a brand (as this was all hypothetical), I decided to make that part of their missions statement.

Case Study

Figma Prototype

Research:

To avoid my own bias, I wanted to reserach what common barriers for beginner campers or people that were apprehensive about camping.

Compared to other projects, I started the interview process fairly early, just to get a better idea of what the users’ needs were.

Findings

Our secondary research found that that the two most common reasons people to not pursue camping are are lack of knowledge and fear of going alone.
Because if this, I wanted to find a way to include a sense of community and also list a prominent source to share information

Pain Points

Limited finances
Limited knowledge
Limited English (one of my personas is an immigrant with limited English ability)
Feeling overwhelmed

Ideation:

Based on our findings, I thought it would be important to feature a prominent blog or help page that would list articles with helpful information on safety and tips for beginner hikers. This is one of the first things your see when loading the app

I also borrowed ideas from auditing other brands and wanted to establish a sense of community. Some brands include hashtags and feature social media posts on their site. This is a good way to show real-world models wearing their clothing, but also provides a sense of community as users can comment and interact with each other.

Wireframing:

Considering the target demographic, I felt more open to be more experimental with the layout. Younger audiences are generally more open to unconventional layouts and digital literacy is generally higher (**more on this later)

Because of what we said before about catering ot non-English speakers, I also wanted to make images very prominent.

Paper wireframes:

Digital wireframes:

Refining

I conducted a 2nd round of interviews on the lofi wireframes. Even though my target demograpic was younger adults, most of the people I were able to recruit during the time were actually adults ages 40-65.

**What’s intersting, is despite taking more liberties with the layout and using placeholders instead of images, there weren’t any issue with user flow or legibility. This was a good sign.

One of the main issues was actually the login buttons on the menu page. Because of placement, some users thought this was implying that login was mandatory.

This is when we also worked out more details on the shop pages and decides to replace the navigation on the header with the footer nav that is what I unded up using in the final prototype

Prototyping:

Compared to the other projects, I conducted the interviews for this app fairly early. In hindsight, that was really helpful as it provided a lot of foundational feedback and got a lot of the decision-making out of the way early on. Most of the workflow for this project was familairising myself with Figma and making further design decisions.