Everyone loves nature, but some hikes are just not meant for everyone. With the need to satisfy everyone's different needs like fitness goals, health levels, safety requirements and more, there currently lacks a go-to platform in the market for hikers to get recommendations on trails suited for them.

Therefore, I narrowed the problem to:

To really figure out what users want from such an app, my team and I conducted two types of user research – survey and user interviews. We interviewed these people with the intention of understanding how our potential target audiences (beginners and experienced hikers) currently find trails suited for them, and what is lacking in their current methods.

Some insights we gained are as follows:

- Most popular method to source for hikes: Google Maps

- Key pain points: outdoor places are too crowded, don’t know how to source locations, safety hazards

- Breakdown of what matters most:

- Top 5 features that people want: 

To summarise and give insight to what a potential user might want, we proceeded to create user personas. The following is one user persona, created according to someone who is already an experienced hiker, whose profile most closely matches the target audience of my final solution. 

With user needs and potential target audiences identified, I proceeded to ideate and explore possible solutions that could help solve this problem. Though many ideas came to mind, I eventually settled on 2 that I felt could most comprehensively tackle the problems faced by users. 

1. An application that uses web scraping to get information about suitable trails online and shows information source, and also use user ratings to rank hikes

2. An application that suggests different types of terrains for different fitness goals

The first idea was chosen mostly based on the requirement of satisfying the user’s safety needs. Other applications like AllTrails use user feedback to give a rough guage on the safety levels of these trails, but it proved to not be enough. Thus, I decided that allowing users to understand the source of these trail suggestions might add another level of trust and reassuredness. 

As for the second idea, one of the requirements brought up in the user interviews was that existing apps do not take into account personalised fitness goals when recommending trails and activities. By creating an app that specifically tailors to the fitness goals of each individual, this problem would be solved.

To assess the feasibility of these ideas, I came up with several wireframes. 

With user feedback in mind, the mid-fidelity prototype was created. 

To test whether my design was actually functional, I sat two of my friends down to walk through the mid-fi prototype with them, and analysed their interactions and thoughts about the design. 

Some insightful quotes I got from them were: