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Venture Compass 🏕

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Venture Compass

UX + INTERACTION COURSE PROJECT / 8 WEEKS / FEB - APR 2018

A multi-day camping and road-trip app that provides information about nearby campsites and points of interest. Venture Compass helps prepare for trips by creating custom equipment lists, as well as documenting them by keeping track of paths and visited places.

TL;DR - through analyzing personas, user journey mapping, sketching, and prototyping, we designed an app to help alleviate travel anxiety while also creating ways to relive experiences.

Team

Ben Wong + Zhihan Wei

Role

Interaction Design + Interface Design + Prototyping

My role was to lead the interaction and interface design, as well as develop the app prototype. Since my group members were less familiar with design software and design concepts in general, I ensured that considerations brought up were well-supported by our initial values to help keep the project focused.

Context

Venture Compass was the final project for an Interface Design course that involved research, wireframing, and prototyping. We wanted to create an experience catered towards more adventurous travellers willing to go beyond the common day trip.

Concept + Process

DEVELOPING PERSONAS / ANALYZING EXPERIENCES

A Resource for Experienced Hikers

The idea for Venture Compass emerged when the concern for planning multi-day hiking and camping trips arose. There are many apps out there that help navigate people along trails via offline maps as well as provide information such as elevation gain and distance travelled, however, these trips typically last one day. There are more adventurous travellers out there willing to take their skills further and embark on multi-day trips.

Defining the Problem

The idea for our app initially began as a backpacking aid that aimed to help foreign travellers navigate through regions they've never been to, as well as provide key travel information such as hostel, food, service, and rest locations.

Through our own personal experiences, as well as by conducting research among our peers, we concluded that two of the most concerning issues when hiking and travelling were not being prepared enough, whether it be food or equipment related, and not knowing what to do when getting lost.

Persona

The persona we developed was an experienced hiker that would like to take his outdoor lifestyle further. Logan hikes a lot with his friends around his city but these are always one-day trips. He and his friends have decided they want to try camping and road-tripping. Logan is excited, but still concerned about various aspects of the trip like bringing the right amount of food and equipment.

Addressing Lack of Confidence

We visualized the experience Logan might have while backpacking in a foreign country. In this case, Logan is an experienced hiker but has never taken part in a trip this large in scale, so there are concerns around what he should bring and what to do if he finds himself in an unfamiliar place. By focusing on these areas, we can minimize the anxiety that can come with new ventures.

Adjusting Scope

This was a good start to identifying existing pain points when it came to backpacking, however when considering the many different situations one might come across while doing so, including aspects such as expenditure tracking and hostel locating, we decided that the scope was quite large given the timeframe of the project.

We wanted to keep the idea of a multi-day adventuring app, so we revised our backpacking idea into a local road-trip and camping app. This way, we could focus on the identified issues without getting carried away with more niche technicalities.

After lowering our scope, we re-evaluated the experience to look at other areas we could address when it came to multi-day camping.

Our two main areas of concern continued to revolve around planning and navigation, and lowering the scope allowed us to focus on the experiences involved with equipment preparation and navigation between campsites.

Everyone Differs in Skill

I began sketching potential features for our app. Because of the varied skill levels across many hikers, we chose to develop two different travel modes; one for a more guided approach, and another for more carefree or experienced travellers. Trip Planner would suggest a route with points of interest on the way based on an entered destination. For more intermediate hikers or people who don't have a specific destination in mind, Free Roam would simply track a trip while still providing information about local campsites and rest stops.

Takeaways

Intensive and Rewarding

This was the first project of this scope that I've worked on related to UX, and it taught me a lot about different research methods and how to visualize your users' thoughts and pain points through different frameworks.

If I were to work on this project further, I'd focus on polishing and adjusting the UI to make it more appealing. With so many interactions to consider, it was important for us to keep moving forward and not dwell on adjusting every single UI element.

Being in charge of both interface design and prototyping was an exhaustive task, especially since I was working with software I'd never used before. Because of this, it allowed me to step into more of a director role and push the project forward, which I haven't really had the chance to do before.

Updates!

Giving Venture Compass a Facelift

This project was done way back in 2018 and I've kept it here because of its in-depth process. A lot has changed since then!

Below are updated Venture Compass screens with UI that better aligns with more modern design trends.