PROJECT SUMMARY

Opt Outside is a concept piece for an integrated social camping planning app adhering to the REI brand. REI promotes environmental stewardship and a movement called "Opt Outside," where participants choose to eschew materialistic holidays such as Black Friday and opt to spend their holidays out in nature. I drew on this movement as my inspiration for this web app. 

After conducting many user interviews with avid social campers, I discovered that the biggest pain point when planning an app was having a dedicated communication channel to the actual planning portion. Using texts and email is a poor way to plan as it is easy to lose track of certain responsibilities, travel arrangements, and costs. 

Opt Outside functions as a seamless method for friends to keep track of their camping plans together. 

ROLE
Research, design, usability testing

TOOLS
Pen & paper, InVision, Sketch, Omnigraffle

SKILLS
Domain & user research, affinity mapping, wireframes, clickable prototype

my role

For this solo concept piece, I was responsible for all aspects of this project throughout the entire design process.
More specifically:

• Domain research
• User interviews
• Affinity Diagram
• Persona & Scenario creation
• Design
• Test
• Spec & annotation sheets

RESEARCH & PLAN

After digging deep into both REI's mission statement and the data collected from the 2014 and 2015 American Camper Reports, I conducted 5 interviews with campers aged 25-35 across the spectrum of experience levels. 

My main research findings were brought to light after producing affinity diagrams and settling on my primary persona: Benji, a man in his late-twenties who goes on overnight camping trips with his buddies a few times every summer. 

User Interviews, Key Takeaways: 

• People plan hiking/camping trips from guidebooks and sites like WTA.org
• Planning camping trips with friends is really hard, often done through email chains
• Many people borrow gear/equipment from friends
• People want to see pretty things

DESIGN & TEST

For my design phase, I ended up drawing many potential screen states. After seeing them all laid out, it was clear that not all of my ideas worked in the context of accomplishing the simple task of communicating a camping plan with multiple friends. I settled on a few main screen states and began to design them out in Sketch. 

I pushed all of my first iteration screens into inVision as a clickable prototype and conducted user testing on my current designs to gather insight for my next iteration. 

SPEC SHEET & ANNOTATIONS

The spec sheet and annotations guide I created for my OptOutside prototype.

suggested next steps

After conducting usability tests, the next steps in the design process would be:

• Enhance the design from mid-fi to hi-fi
• Change the language of the secondary navigation bar
• Clean up the messenger/camp list widget