Adventurely: An app for adventure sports athletes to practice together.
The Overview
For our first individual project at the Ironhack UX/UI Bootcamp, the brief was to develop a digital product for the wellness industry; be it to better the user’s mental, physical, or emotional health. We were given 2 weeks to design an MVP.
After some guerilla interviews, I identified the following problem statement…
People who practice extreme sports need to be able to get together with other athletes because it is too dangerous to practice alone.
The Investigation
My target audience was people who actively practice adventure sports of any kind. I turned to specialized facebook groups and forums in order to collect usable data from the surveys and interviews. The quantitative data I collected allowed me to get more insight into the market and validate the problem statement:
The User
With so much data, it was time to put it all in one place. An empathy map helped me to organize my findings, and Mateo (my user persona) allowed me to focus on the key pain points:
In the Lean UX canvas, I planned to monetize the app through a commission taken from a fare splitting feature. This feature would be used by users to settle any costs from their trips, such as gas money. However, the User Journey helped me realise that this was not a main pain point for users and therefore not in the scope of the MVP. I revised the monetization to be gained through advertising. As the user base is so specific, targeted advertising will allow for bigger returns.
The Solution
After multiple brainstorming sessions and bouncing ideas off my peers, I landed on a social media app. Users can post their own trips, browse existing ones, and message to plan their trips.
The user flow I focused on shows how to post and edit a trip as the planning process is what users struggle with most.
The UI
Using Figma Mirror helped me to adjust the sizing of my designs. Seeing them on different phone screens helped me realise that some elements looked far too big on the screen.
Working with colour styles in Figma also helped me to adjust my colour scheme in the final stages of the design easily. Noticing that the original colours did not pass all accessibility checks late in the design process taught me to check the accessibility of my designs from early on.
The Prototype
The Conclusion
As each day went by, I found myself simplifying the product more and more. This project has taught me the importance of fighting featuritis and focusing on the crux of the problem when developing an MVP.
The car sharing and fare splitting features however are something that I would eventually like to incorporate given a wider scope. It would require more time and investment, but based on my investigation, these features would create a more complete experience for adventure sports athletes.
