AllTrails Social Newsfeed
Problem
The mission statement of AllTrails says they are “here to foster happy, healthy communities by connecting people to the outdoors and to each other.” Right now the AllTrails app does not provide users the opportunity for social engagement with friends. Users are able to “follow” friends, but there is no screen to show friends’ activity or any ways to interact with each other within the app.
Background
AllTrails is an outdoor adventure app for users to discover new trails, plan their routes ahead of time, navigate on the trail, and share photos/reviews. AllTrails was founded in 2010 in San Francisco, CA. They have curated 200,000+ hiking trails and mountain bike routes for users to discover and navigate, or save for the future. Their product offers trail coverage in 190 countries, 30 territories, and all 7 continents.
Solution
To enable users to connect with each other I created a newsfeed where recorded activities, reviews, and posts could be shared with friends and the community. Users are able to like and comment on the posts and they can tag each other in the posts. This newsfeed can also be filtered to show only the type of posts or topics the user is interested in seeing. I redesigned the trail page to show friends who have completed the trail and gave users the ability to filter reviews by friends first. I also added the ability to search for members and redesigned the member’s profile page to show their activity in a more visual way.
Research
Research Goals -
To find out if users want to share their outdoor activity on an app dedicated to those activities or if users want to share this on social media platforms they already use.
Methodologies -
Competitive Analysis: Online research into direct competitors and how they provide users the ability to engage with each other.
Provisional Personas: Create simple user personas based on assumptions and previous experience to summarize what I already know about potential users and discover what I need to find out.
Online Survey: Survey current AllTrails users about their outdoor activity habits and desires.
Deliverables -
User Persona: to direct all future design decisions
User Journey Map: to discover necessary features and brainstorm additional helpful features.
Competitive Analysis
To discover whether the lack of social features was a problem that needed solving I first did some competitive analysis. The outdoor adventure and fitness app market is very competitive and has a high barrier to entry, leading to AllTrails having mainly indirect competitors. I chose not to look at their most direct competitor, Gaia GPS, because like AllTrails they do not have a social aspect. The Slopes and Strava apps combine personal and social outdoor activity incredibly well. Customer satisfaction is very high and users report using the apps for both personal and social competition. Most Strava users say social interaction and competition with friends is their main reason for using it. Slopes users say they will not ski or snowboard without turning on the app and they love to see how their stats stack up against their friends and their own performance from previous years. Although there is some potential crossover in offerings from these apps and AllTrails, they do not fulfill quite the same need. There is still an opportunity for AllTrails to have social engagement and not be in direct competition with these apps.
Survey Results
The goal of my survey was to understand the current AllTrails users; specifically how they interacted with the app and how social their relationship with the outdoors already was. Survey results indicate there is a medium desire for social interaction between friends on outdoor activity apps. Most users participate in outdoor activities with their friends and would be interested to see what activities their friends have completed. The users who do outdoor activities alone more often than they do with friends don’t care much about seeing their friends' activity or interacting with them on an app. However, the more social participants would be interested to see their friends' activities and they are the majority.
Do you normally participate in outdoor activities alone, with friends, or a combination of both?
Do you care to see if your friends have completed an activity or trail you are looking into?
How often do you share photos or videos from your outdoor activities on social media platforms? (such as Instagram or Facebook)
How much would you like to be able to see your friend's activity on one of these apps?
User Persona
Sociable Sam
Bio Sam lives in Salt Lake City in a house with four close friends. He works from home and is frequently meeting up with friends for a long lunch or finishing work early to go on some adventure. Anytime there is a chance to do something outdoors AND with friends, Sam is there! He is fairly active on social media but doesn’t take it too seriously. Sam likes to know what is currently popular while not actually caring about appearances at the same time. He knows a lot of different people, but his inner circle is small, tight-knit, and consistent.
User Journey Map
The act of putting Sociable Sam through a scenario allowed me to determine where the user experience could be improved and to come up with ideas for additional features. See the scenario and the opportunities discovered below…
Scenario: Sam wants to plan and go on a hike with some friends. He wants to see what hikes people in his community are sharing and then share his own experience.
Opportunities:
Separate friends and community activity on the newsfeed
Add sort and filter option to the newsfeed page
Option to post privately to “friends” or post publicly. Ability to tag friends in a post.
Connect a user’s activity to friends the user is with so the friends can get credit and the group only uses one phone.
Define
After getting to know the users I had to map out how and what I would be adding to the app. Based on the users current behaviors and their wants and needs I narrowed down “must have” features in order to create a minimum viable product. Along with creating a newsfeed for all posts to be displayed, users would need to be able to search for and view their friends profiles, compare their stats, see friends reviews, and save activity as a post. These actions do not all build on each other chronologically to fit into one task flow so I isolated three flows that in total encompassed all new features.
Feature Roadmap
Social Newsfeed - Create a new page showing all the user's friend's activity as it is shared. Posts can include sharing recorded activity, reviews/ratings, invitations, stats, and accomplishments.
Friends who have completed the trail - On a trail page, add the names of the user's friends who have completed the trail
Profile feed - Make profile pages more visual and show all items in a chronological stream instead of within categories/lists
Wireframes
After defining the flows, I went straight to making high-fidelity wireframes because most of this work involved using existing design and adding to it or putting it together in a new way. Having everything digitally mocked up allowed me to experiment with different arrangements and placements while keeping the integrity of the existing designs.
Design
Having so much detail already on the wireframes made adding the UI design elements fairly simple. My aim was to match how colors, shapes, and icons are already being used on the app. Achieving that would mean the new features blend seamlessly into the app and feel like they belong. For example, I took the section header design used multiple times on the trail page and used it at the top of the user profile page and the newsfeed page. I also examined how the primary color of green was being used to represent a link and to show when something has been selected and I replicated that on the new screens.
High-Fidelity Screens
Testing
Usability Testing
With the completed prototype I ran four participants through a usability test. This showed me where I had not fully flushed out some aspects of the design and one potential hitch in the last task of saving an activity. One of my oversights was in designing a post where friends were tagged to show they had come on the hike, but not including a way to tag friends when saving the activity. I also forgot to include a notification center for users to see the likes, comments, and new followers they’ve received. The potential hitch in saving an activity was that users might not know to scroll down to select an audience and/or that it is a required task in order to save.
Revisions
The first revision I made was to add a notification center and a system to indicate to the users that they have new notifications to check. The app does not have a fixed header on every screen so I added the notification icon to the social newsfeed page. When there are new notifications the bell icon will have a red dot and the social icon on the fixed bottom menu will have a red dot so the user can be on another page in the app and know they have notifications.
After completing an activity, users are able to rate and review a trail before saving the activity and sharing it. I added the ability to tag friends after reviewing the trail so users can indicate who joined them on their activity. Down the line I would like to take this a step further and add the ability for friends who are tagged to get credit on their accounts for the saved activity. This would be useful so only one person needs to record the hike on their account and have their battery used up.
Once a user is done rating, reviewing, tagging friends, and adding photos to their recorded activity they must choose an audience for their activity. Since users might not understand they need to scroll down to find this section and/or that it is required I changed it to be a pop-up after they are ready to save their activity. The post button will not be active until they choose a selection. This method takes the guesswork out of the user flow.
Prototype
Conclusion
The majority of AllTrails users already participate in outdoor activity with other people, so adding features to increase interaction between users on the app is a natural recommendation. Also, the app is already collecting all of the data needed to add these features. If I were to redo this project I would make the survey more robust and ask more in-depth questions to understand how users interact to arrange activities and how they decide what trail or activity to do together. I feel my research showed a need for the features but could have provided more information on how to design them to meet users’ needs. Despite the potential insufficiency in research, I received a highly positive response from participants during the usability test; they all expressed satisfaction and pleasure regarding the low learning curve and ease of use. The next steps would be to design the screen where a user can create a post from scratch, update the prototype, and retest the prototype with the additional screen and the other revisions I made.