Streamline your camping trip planning process.
CampHere is a platform that aims to create a seamless camping trip planning experience by streamlining the campsite searching process and providing better access to details of other supplemental activities.
Role: Product Designer
Duration: 3 months
Tools: Figma
Frameworks: Design Sprint, Prototyping, Brainstorming, Storyboarding, Usability Testing, Competitive Analysis
People have difficulty finding places to camp that and need to an easy, seamless solutions to plan their trips.
A platform that will consolidate all the available campsites from multiple websites into one spot and includes additional suggestions to streamline the whole planning process.
I love to go camping to reconnect to nature. However, the state and national park websites used to manage and book available campsites are clunky and unintuitive. This makes the initiation to plan a camping trip difficult. Is this just personal problem, or do other struggle with this too? I set out to find out how I can improve this experience for others.
Target Audience:
People who plan camping trips, whether with groups or by themselves
Due to the short timeframe of a class semester, I knew I wouldn’t have time to fully develop a complete product. As a student, I also lacked the resources to build a functioning prototype and knew I would have to employ my best prototyping skills in Figma.
I employed the design sprint process to efficiently sketch designs, prototype, and test ideas in order to determine whether this new product would be effective and helpful to the target user. For this design sprint, I would narrow down to a specific problem to design and test for.
Starting at the end, I set a long-term goal to aim for:
People should be able to easily plan and organize their outdoor camping trips, without the pains of having to research and coordinate from multiple different booking sites and planning tools.
In the next stage, I began to brainstorm solutions using the 4-step sketch method. While doing this exercise, I aimed to come up with a solution that would be out-of-the-box and be an interesting solution to test in the design sprint.
Next, I needed to decide on the best idea to move forward with to prototype. Although I worked on this project individually, I was able to present my ideas during to other designers.
In that time, I was able to receive feedback from other designers by getting votes on the best design. I proceeded with the design that had garnered the most votes.
With the final design, I created a 15 frame storyboard that starts with the opening scene of the task and ending with the goal.
After creating the storyboard, I began to prototype. I aimed to create a prototype of "Goldilocks Quality". Because I didn't have time to creating a prototype that had all the functions of a working website, I created interactive elements only for the key parts of the task flow that I wanted to test.
To conduct meaningful usability testing, I ensured that I got appropriate testers for this product by creating a screener survey to recruit users who would be the target audience of the product.
After using the screener survey to identify 5 viable testers, I conducted the testing interviews. I mainly focused on how people interacted with the search function that I designed and whether or not they felt like they had a easy, seamless process to search for available campsites.
Key Design Issues:
Taking a Step Back:
After this round of testing, I revised the prototype to address the key issues that the testing uncovered. In the revisions, my main focus was to redesign the search function to interact more flexibly for users.
After completing the usability testing, I realized I still had unanswered questions about the effectiveness of my product to solve the main problem, which was people feeling frustrated about having to visit many other websites to figure out the other logistics of the trip.
I had to pivot to conduct a round of competitive analysis testing, comparing my product to existing solutions, to better understand whether or not my product solved the problem that current products don't address.
My main question is: Does this product streamline the process for users to plan their entire camping trip?
Good Features:
Features to Improve:
If I had more time to work on this project, I would like to develop other features in the tool to improve it’s effectiveness at streamlining the camping trip planning process, such as:
Expand target users:
This tool currently only specifically targets the type of camper who plans their trips ahead of time and are mainly car campers. However, there are different types of campers, such as those who are more spontaneous, and those who go backpacking, RV camping, or glamping. These different personas would have different challenges and needs. I would like to explore how those needs differ, such as what kind of filters in the search function do they need, and what solutions I can design to solve those problems.
Develop & Test:
Furthermore, I’d like to continue refining the flexible search feature. Currently, I am limited in my ability to prototype a functional search feature with usable filters using Figma. If I had the resources, I would have a developer build out the prototype, and thus I would be able to test the effectiveness of the search layout and the flexible search filters that I’ve designed.
Itinerary Builder Tool:
Additionally, I want to further develop the embedded trip planning tools, such as quickly finding nearby activities to do and adding them to the user’s trip itinerary, such as finding popular hiking trails nearby. Other aspects of trip-planning that test interviewees mentioned were important to them were predicted weather patterns, distance away and time it takes to drive to the campsite, and accurate photos.