Raft
An app that helps river rafters plan group rafting trips.
Problem Summary:
River rafters need a way to easily plan group multi-day rafting trips. Currently river rafters rely on huge, unwieldy spreadsheets and long email threads to plan trips. With these tools, it’s difficult to find and reference notes and keep track of members and logistics.
I know you are probably really busy, so I’ve put the current wireframes and prototype of the app right at the top of my case study.
Scroll down for more in-depth information on my design process.
Prototype
Wireframes
Now, let’s talk about how I made it!
Methodology
Iteration and design thinking are crucial to my personal research and design process. I planned my research around the design-thinking double diamond of: Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver, beginning with Discovery.
My role
Product Designer
Discover Part I: Pre-Research
Method
What I learned
I find it very helpful to make a research plan for the discovery phase of development, but before I even start to plan, I like to have a pre-research/discovery phase that is unplanned and allows me to be open in exploring the problem, without pre-conceptions or biases. I will use traditional techniques during this time, but I like to implement them in an informal way. I will casually talk to users to discover their needs and the problem, explore competitor solutions, read up on the industry, and conduct heuristic evaluations (if applicable) among other methods. For the RAFT app, I spoke with 12 different rafters during this time, in-person, by email, and on online forums. I reviewed maps of different rivers, followed and read articles and comments on an online rafting forum, and reviewed other rafting and outdoor apps. The informal approach allowed me the freedom to get to know the space (without my own goals coloring my understanding the problem) and learn from users who might not be willing to participate in a formal survey or interview.
Many rafters rely on huge spreadsheets (often Google sheets) to plan their trips.
Rafters rely on group email threads that span months to keep track of conversations and reportedly struggle to remember/find relevant information. Getting off topic and being pinged constantly with messages was also a source of frustration. Because the conversations are so long, some users who were added late to a group weren’t added to all of the conversations, which can lead to confusion/communication issues.
Most other rafting apps are of very low quality.
There are related apps that are of higher quality, such as AllTrails.
Rafters often go with the same group of people for years in part due to the lottery system for securing/scheduling river trips
Discover Part II: Research Plan
Based on what I learned form the pre-discovery phase, I surveyed 18 rafters in order to determine what features to focus on and formed a research and development plan. I released a “concept mockup” of the home page and login of the app along with the survey in order to give the survey a sense of legitimacy. I wanted to let participants know that this is a real app that is being developed, and that this is their chance to affect it.
Plan
Survey
Here is a link to the questions and results of the survey. (Link will open in a new tab).
You can view my Research & Development Plan here.
(Link will open in a new tab).
Define Part I:
While waiting for the results of my survey, I began to the work of defining my problem. I started with a brain map of all the different functions that would be useful in the app, which allowed me to start to decide what would be MVP features, and what could wait.
Mind Map
Mind mapping helped me organize all of my thoughts and decide which features to prioritize. When I’m beginning a design process, I usually have many different ideas but don’t have a clear picture for how to organize them or how they might relate to one another. With the mind map I was able to organize functions into different types, which helped me visualize the app and how it could work. I broke the functions down into 3 main types: reference, social, and planning. Then I realized that I could further break down the reference and note functionality into two categories: tasks a user would preform during a trip, and tasks that would be performed before or after a trip.
“Site” (App) Map
Based on the mind-mapping I did, I realized that having two modes (in trip and pre/post trip) to base the app around might be a good idea. I thought that an “in-trip” mode could actually present real-time information such as upcoming rapids and campgrounds, to rafters as they were on the trip. I worked with this idea for the wireframing and map of the apps functionality at first, but I later scrapped the pre/post vs in-trip structure.
This was my original idea for a the architecture of the app.
After interviewing users I would realize that in most cases, users wouldn’t be able to connect to the internet while rafting, so real-time updates about things like upcoming rapids would usually be impossible.
Instead, I decided to add an option to download maps for specific trips as a premium feature.
Functions on Different Screens
I also started mapping what functions would be available on different screens. Note that in this version I have “begin trip” as something that you could do from the main trip screen, but that would later be removed. I used Balsamiq to make the lo-fidelity wireframes during this stage to help me quickly visualize the functions but not waste time on visual aspects that might later need to be changed.
Survey Results
The biggest takeaway from the survey was that of the options given, users most want a better way to message and manage group members, and also share pictures and notes between members. 15 of the 20 people surveyed listed messaging and managing group members as their highest priority. 12 of 20 people listed sharing pictures and notes as their second priority. With this information, I was able to narrow down my MVP and focus on those two functions. I want to keep the first sprint small, ship it, and then continue working on more features — consistent with AGILE development methodology.
Survey Conclusions & Sprint Planning
I identified note-taking and sharing (including photos) and messaging as my primary app features for Sprint 1.