The Problem

Many campers rely on using government national forest/national park websites to book their camping trips. The issue with these websites is they typically have complex navigations, lack of user-friendliness, and insufficient visuals, resulting in a cumbersome user experience that makes the process of booking camping trips difficult.

Solution

The Happy Camper app addresses these issues and provides a user-friendly and visually appealing experience for campers to discover and book campgrounds. It also allows users to discover hiking trails and restaurants near their campground of choice, making it even easier for users to plan their camping trips.

Process

As my team and I began the design journey for the Happy Camper app, we started by conducting a series of engaging user interviews, and aimed to truly understand the desires and challenges of our user base. These interviews provided invaluable insights that we gathered to create a comprehensive user persona, a visual representation of Happy Camper's diverse audience.

With our user persona in hand, our next step was to create the customer journey. This entailed mapping out every step, action, emotion, and interaction that a Happy Camper user would experience while using the app. This process allowed us to gain a holistic view of the user's engagement with the app, identifying pain points and opportunities for improvement.

After finishing our customer journey, we directed our efforts to the user flow, and focused on simplicity and personalization. Our goal was to minimize user frustration by streamlining the user flow, while also providing customization options based on individual camping preferences. This approach aimed to create a tailored user experience that caters to the unique needs of each user.

Guided by our research, we moved on to shaping the app's foundation through lo-fi wireframes. Based off our initial research we found that users exhibited a 50% increase in engagement with campground listings when presented with multiple images. In response, we introduced a carousel feature to these listings, empowering users to seamlessly preview a variety of campground images before making their selection.

Following the completion of our lo-fi wireframes, we transitioned to designing our mid-fi prototypes and integrated elements from our style guide. We conducted research on Happy Camper's competitors to identify design elements that would resonate with the camping community, and ultimately decided on a burnt orange color scheme which gave off an earthy ambiance, paired with the 'Staatliches' font.

As we progressed to usability testing, valuable user feedback began to flow in. Users expressed discontent with the initial burnt orange color scheme, and explained how there was a lack of information within campground listings on the homepage. Since our font choice was an all caps font, we also decided to change our font to enhance accessibility. After carefully analyzing this feedback, we reevaluated the color palette and enriched the campground listings with comprehensive information, aiming to create an intuitive and visually pleasing user experience that aligns with the aspirations of campers.

Reflecting on this journey, the Happy Camper app project has been a passion-fueled adventure. It's more than just a design; it's a solution that guides users through their camping experiences. This endeavor has not only showcased our design expertise but also our problem-solving capabilities. We are confident in the value we've brought to the project, and the culmination of our efforts is evident in the intricate, hi-fi clickable prototype that truly brings the Happy Camper app's user journey to life.