Kick - off your camping trip with ease
Lately, camping has enjoyed a surge in popularity, largely driven by the pandemic, with many first-time campers emerging.
Yet, planning a camping trip, from choosing a campsite to gear procurement, can be overwhelming, leading many to miss out on the thrill of this experience.
The Problem
CampStarter is a mobile app designed to help first-time campers prepare easily. Users pick a campsite and receive gear suggestions, rental options, and a checklist, simplifying planning and reducing costs. Meanwhile, a supportive community ensures a stress-free first camping experience!
The Solution
Create an app to help first-time campers with trip preparation by simply selecting a preferred site. Once chosen, combining with personalized info, users will be given a suggested gear checklist along with the option of rental service to make the start easy and cost-effective.
Features
1. Professional Gear Suggestions
based on weather & general info of site
Users will be provided with 3 cards of gear suggestions:
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essential for this site
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recommended to have for this site
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optional for this site
Then users can add the lists to checklist and add the gear to the cart if they need rental service.
2. Featured Gear Rental Service
Users can effortlessly rent and have their gear delivered via the rental market. They can choose from branded combos of gear kits or star gear, and conveniently add this order list to the gear checklist.
3. Campers' Community
Campers' community is a platform where users can get insights from other experienced campers about site and gear recommendations and reviews. Following experienced campers and bookmarking useful articles can boost users' confidence in trip preparation.
4. Gear Checklist
Gear checklist under '' My Account'' helps users get more organized with their preparation. Super easy to edit what has been added to the list or conveniently create a new one.
Process
Observations & Researches
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Researches
Design
Insights from observing friends inspire thorough research on first-time campers.
Address user pain points to ideate and discover, while following intuitive design and trends.
Test & Iterations
Conduct multiple rounds of user tests and continuously iterate based on feedback.
The initial problem discovery comes from oberving my friends:
People who’s never camped before get quite upset and struggled once they start packing for their first camping trips.
After thorough research about camping trends and first-time campers, I learnt that 90% of first-time campers expressed concerns about gear and found out the factors have quite an influence during the packing process.
Design Options
When coming up with solutions of suggestive gear list, I combined insights from both market research and user interview and keep in mind:
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What are the users most concerned about?
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How to lay out all the info at user’s convenience?
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What feature is necessary when giving out advice?
Test & Iterations
During the usability test, users gave the feed back of the entire page requires many scrolling down actions to get to the gear part, especially for those users who already booked the site and only want to check out the gear. So I made rounds of iterations striving for more optimized solutions.
The challenge
When designing the gear card, I encountered a challenge. when users want to add the gear to the checklist and add some of the gear to the shopping cart, this gives the selection checkboxes dual tasks. This is not practical. Then I started to think about:
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Do users need to add gear to 2 destinations in the same way?
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What is the most convenient way to create a checklist?
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What info do users need in a checklist?
Initial problem discovery
We invited some friends to go on a camping trip with us recently. They've never camped before and got so excited about this idea and promptly began searching for camping locations, happily offering numerous suggestions on where to go. However, within a couple of days, we often received messages from friends expressing that preparing camping gear was too overwhelming and they were unsure how to proceed, seeking our guidance. This scenario repeated several times with various friends.
So here comes the initial problem discovery:
People who’s never camped before get quite upset and struggled once they start packing for their first camping trips.
But why do people exhibit such different reactions during the preparation process?
After talking with them, and plus of course we've been there, we realized the problem is:
The first-time campers often feel overwhelmed when they start the packing process as it is not as easy and intriguing as site selection.
I started to think about three questions:
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Why do first-time campers think site selection is relatively easy and intriguing?
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Why do first-time campers think packing process is overwhelming and less intriguing?
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What is the relationship between site selection and packing process?
First of all, let's circle back to First-time Campers themselves.
Target audience research
In recent years, camping is experiencing a surge in popularity. Estimated 92 million campers in the US up to the year 2023. It indicates a significant increase in the number of first-time campers.
Then I researched the background of first-time campers and found out some factors that will have quite an influence on what to prepare during the packing process.
And also challenges they're generally facing when doing the preparation.
90% of first-time campers expressed concerns about selecting, utilizing, and maintaining their gear. This insight helped me refine my understanding of the problem more effectively.
Brainstorm and user interview
I invited friends over for brainstorming sessions to understand what drives their desire for the first camping trip, or what holds them back from it? I eventually got 46 data points and catergorized them.
There were quite a few interesting points that came up. So after a few days I further did an interview with them.
One thing noteworthy from the interview is that gear rental emerges as an appealing solution, allowing them to explore more camping gear without significant financial worries.
Synthesizing the findings
I identified three themes from all the findings that encompass both the appealing aspects and challenges of a first camping trip. The interesting perspective is that essentially all the appealing points belong to the process of selecting a site, whereas all the challenges occur during the process of choosing gear, including overwhelming options, cost, suitability, long-term value, etc.
Define the problem
I realized the themes discovered above perfectly answered the 3 questions we raised earlier:
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Why do first-time campers think site selection is relatively easy and intriguing?
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Why do first-time campers think packing process is overwhelming and less intriguing?
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What is the relationship between site selection and packing process?
Cool! Let's fill in the answers then.
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Why do first-time campers think site selection is relatively easy and intriguing?
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Why do first-time campers think packing process is overwhelming and less intriguing?
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What is the relationship between site selection and packing process?
To make packing process equally intriguing and easy as site selection, I would assume the pros that Site Selection could be matched to Gear Selection. Great! With the knowledge of the preparation process, I started to map out the entire user journey during the process and build the personas.
User Journey
Building the persona
With the journey map and personas, I had a better understanding of user's pain points and when do those pain points occur. Now we can clearly define the problem as:
Navigating challenges with design
Now I already had a overall idea about the user’s pain points and what they need, therefore I started to use Crazy Eights to ideate the potential solutions to solve these issues that first-time campers may encounter.
Goal mapping
Information architecture of the main flow
from Site Selection to Gear List
Goals
Improve selection efficiency
Provide detailed info for first-time campers to efficiently choose the right gear and equipment based on their preference, circumstances, and weather info collected from the site.
Enhancing the continuity and convenience of the user journey
Select sites first based on available dates and preferences, then automatically give comprehensive gear suggestion and rental service to enhance the user journey to be with ease.
Strengthen the value proposition of core products
Gear suggestion and rental is the primary and core function of this app. Secondary functions i.e. gear checklist and camper’s community serve to assist this primary function to enrich and complete the user journey.
Competitive audit
3 products were selected for competitive analysis, each with a distinct feature related to gear rental, site finder, or online community. Gear rental, being a relatively new feature, is vital. To streamline the process, we aim to seamlessly integrate site and gear suggestions, along with a community feature in the app.
Introducing the CampStarter
Design features
Featured Sites
Gear Suggestion and Rental
Community
Gear Checklist
Provide suggested sites based on personalization session results with feature filter of preferred facilities, weather, etc..
Given the desired site, we provide a comprehensive set of gear suggestions (must have, recommened, optional for this site) & rental service
Provide a platform to share experience, favorite sites and gears, also learn from and get help from experienced campers.
Provide a gear checklist feature with a suggested default list for campers to get more organized.
User flow
Featured Sites
Account
Personalize
Navigate
Info
Collection
Gear
Suggestion
Gear
Rental
Checkout
Low-fidelity wireframe
High-fidelity prototype
1. Personalized Account
User can personalize their account by taking a survey on gender, financial status, and camping preferences—3 key factors for gear selection, informed by research and user analysis, to optimize the experience."
Personalization session can be skipped anytime.
3 questions about gender, financial situation and preferred camping type will be asked to show suggested sites and gear later.
2 more questions about preferred camping location and number of companions will also be asked to show suggested sites and gear later.
Users can go through several survey questions to personalize their account if they need suggestions for their trip.
2. Easy Camping Prep
Starting From A Featured Site
Finding a featured site is suggested as a easy starting point for camping preparation. Users can utilize comprehensive filters to find their preferred site and view gear suggestions for the site. Extend these gear suggestions to similar sites (weather, nature features, and elevations) as well.
Comprehensive filter with categorized site featrue and personal preference.
Suggested site lists based on results of personalization session and filter results.
Separate category of filters better follow users' behaviors and let them target more quickly
3 cards of gear suggestions (essentials, recommended, optional) are provided at site detail page based on site weather, amenity, and perosonal info collected earlier in personalization session
Product lists can be added to checklist or rental cart
Users can directly jump to gear suggestion part by pressing the button on the top of the site detail page
All suggested gear can be conveniently swapped by other alternatives
Users can choose to make rental market show suggested gear based on gear suggestions earlier (if they're coming from site page).
Users can browse camping kits, individual gear, or search by brands.
Diagramatic rental and delivery instruction to make the flow clear and easy to undersatnd.
Users can directly add the order to their gear checklist
Checklists are located under my account, users are fully free to edit/create any lists.
Checklists are categorized to better keep users more organized.
Easy to follow an experienced camper and all their posts
Extensive filter of catergorized posts to save time
The gear and campsite mentioned in the posts will be shown as suggested products / site
Users can conveniently make posts of their questions, gear/site reviews and stories.
7. Search
Users can utilize the search feature to find sites, gear, or articles. Alternatively, explore recommended sites, categorized nature features, and personalized gear suggested for users for inspired ideas.
Comprehensive search and filtering functionality to help users conveniently find their desired site, gear, article, etc.
Suggested campsites to provide users with inspirations
Convenient search shortcuts
Provide people with wide range of selections by features
Design explorations
Thinking through ''Suggested gear list'' design
When designing this page, I thought about what content should be prioritized for users to see, what behaviours are they more used to following, and what actions are most important for them to take. I asked myself the following questions:
How to show a card containing gear all at once?
Should we display these cards in order of priority for having these gear?
How to categorize the gear in each card?
What is the most important info that users want to know at the first glance?
What if the users are not satisfied with one or more gear in the list?
What is the ' right' amount of info for users?
When designing the homepage where users can find their desired site, we thought about what amount of info is appropriate so that users can get a clear glance at all info they need. We asked ourselves the following questions:
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What is the most necessary info users need to decide if they like the site or not?
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How many sites to show on one screen and how big the site cover pic will be?
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Do they need suggested categories of sites or that can be put under filters?
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What is the most convenient way to skim throgh the pics?
Next step
In the future, I’d like to add a map in the site search filter, so the users can easily found campsites with similar weather and features that the suggested gear could also apply to, in case their originally desired site is not available.
( FYI - The amazing 2D illustrations in this style are from Storyset, go check out this amazing website and enjoy! )
