Prepare to be a great mountaineer — UI/UX case study

Challenge was to design a dashboard where trainer would record and analyse there performance before participating for hiking event.

If you’re getting ready for your first mountaineering or hiking trip then you absolutely need to acquire the technical skills. You won’t make it to
the summit, though, unless your body is also ready for the physical challenge.

Research

Your training approach must be customized for you and the specific space you’ll be attempting to summit. That said, these are the general steps you’ll follow for any mountaineering training plan.

1. Assess your current fitness level. This might even include a physical from a doctor and/or an evaluation by a certified trainer. If you’re going with a reputable guide service, they’ll counsel you on the physical preparedness required and will ask you to provide a complete medical history.
2. Consider the physical requirements of your climb. Mountaineering is essentially an endurance event, like a marathon.Being able to climb at a steady rate that you can aerobically maintain without stopping, plus having enough energy and strength to descend safely, will be key objectives to your training plan.
3. Decide how you’ll approach your training. Your detailed plan can be something you put together on your own.
4. Develop a personalized training plan. Mountaineering requires multiple types of training, each focusing on a different need.

• Cardio workouts to improve the overall fitness level of your heart and lungs.
• Interval sessions to boost your ability to process more oxygen with each breath.
• Strength and endurance exercises so you can haul a heavy load and sustain physical output for many hours.
• Balance and flexibility training because you need both for mountaineering.
• Hiking days and quantity of water consumed.

Design Process

I follow a Lean UX Design thinking process. It starts with getting to know the personas we’re designing for. Without them, we wouldn’t know what to design, how it should work, or why it matters.

I have divided my process into 4 steps as below diagram:

User Persona

I developed a user persona based on the Market Research and Interview data. By empathising with this user, I was able to better understand their pain points, needs, wants, goals, and what their day-to-day hike might look like on a deeper level and finalised a user.

ADITYA — THE YOUNG PROFESSIONAL / MALE / 26 YRS OLD

Due to Aditya’s busy work and personal life, he does not get a lot of time to check on his physical being, According to him he wants to evaluate the outcomes of exercise he has been doing to prepare for hiking.

I forgot training today too.

Pain Points of aditya
1. Lack of training caused injury
2. Having to get information on various sources.
3. Does not know when to take intervals.
4. Being continuously motivated throughout the hike is a challenge.

Gains of Aditya
1. Wants an app where he can log his intervals during hike and steps.
2. Wants a buddy to be motivated consistently.
3. Community to interact with.
4. Localised leader board to track my position in the same group.

Measurement of successful Dashboard

No. Of people logged there routine/Habits
No. Of people reacted/interacted with the leaderboard or community
No. Of minutes spent for successfully completing the flow
No. of people got their goals completed

After my initial research and understanding how hiking works as an experience and the value it brings to our target users. I will start to brainstorm and explore different user segments and goals.

Choosing other features (Brainstorming)

Other than logging activities on dashboard. So, what features do I need to include to accomplish Mountrain? These are some ideas that I started thinking about:

• Log your daily activity to check progress on dashboard
• Connect any health/ activity tracker with the app
• Find people around you and challenges, so you can go with them to the training (Maybe sharing same “problems” like lack of motivation, health conditions…).
• Notifications and congratulations messages, to keep motivated and don’t let user skip training.
• Community, groups and event listings to interact with.
• Virtual gifts to keep the user motivated through tracking of his performance and preparation.

Prioritizing features (MoSCoW Method)

After defining the features that my project should have I needed to prioritize which one is needed to accomplish users need. The MoSCoW method is a prioritization technique for helping to understand and manage priorities. The letters stand for:

• Must Have
• Should Have
• Could Have
• Won’t Have this time

The use of MoSCoW works particularly well on dashboard products. It also overcomes the problems associated with simpler prioritization approaches which are based on relative priorities…

Let me tell you my results:

Must have:

• Accomplishments in feed
• Plan your day
• Set your goals
• Log your activity

Should have:

• Training Exercises & explanations
• Challenges
• community interaction

Could have:

• Event tracker
• virtual achievements

Won’t have:

• Play games
• Find people around to train with you.

Some considerations

1. User has already signed in into his account.
2. User knows about the platform and basic features about the application.
3. User has onboarded on the platform where they are asked to fill their (height, age, weight, experience in hiking, goals, trek information etc.
4. App calculates BMI on its own

• User can record and log the daily fitness activity.
• User will be notified about his trek routine.
• User will be reminded on time to log the activity.
• User will be alerted if he/she does excess exercise.
• User can also read tips and tricks on how to get prepared for the event.
• Everytime there is an alert of not doing enough to complete goal users will have CTA ‘How to improve’ which takes a user to the screen where he can explore tips and get motivated
• User can also add reminder according to his routine to add the log. (Under setting).
• User knows about his/her condition on fitness level.
• User has done doctor consultation for his/her condition.
• Explore Tab is for social blogs and other help, suggestion & tips
• Assuming content partnership or in house content is already available.
• For future purpose- Explore tab can have nutrition suggestions & e-commerce platform.

User Onboarding is the most important journey of overall app life and user experience.

It define how the app can help user to resolve this problem.

User has to give some information to app like Age, weight, height and goal to determine what is the current condition of the user and how much it will affect the daily diet to reduce or make user healthy.

• In this app we are taking Age,Weight,Height etc (considering age is already available or taken on sign up).
• All these information are useful and necessary to calculate BMI which determine the actual body health for higher altitude.

Wireframes

Iterations after tests:

• Daily to weekly routine
• Added Goals and Progress
• Simplified “on boarding” and “treking” steps

High fidelity wireframe

The UI designed above is basic, and through iterations can be polished and well done.

The dashboard talks about the trek which the user is preparing for; where he can check his daily, weekly and monthly performance the card beneath talks about the overall progress and states.
The progress graph shows no of kms completed out of no of kms goal which has been set byt the user.

While what we see in the user persona users do feel demotivated if not completed the given task. Hence we need to have a motivation factor and trustline “you are doing better than 45% of the hikers”.

Cards beneath trustline lets you know the most important part of your training BMI, Intervals, Water consumed & no. of kms targeted daily, weekly or monthly. Right now the user only sees a brief of terms. All of these cards are clickable where they land onto analysis tab and see details of per term.

With that we have additional information yet important for a user hiking at an higher altitude to know their blood pressure, glucose level & oxygen level.

Assume a user who is interested into hiking but is not fit and is not able to complete daily tasks. he would be notified on how the user can improve and will always be given an option to quit (with a guilt factor saying “I want to give up”) Once the user clicks on I give up they’ll be taken to the social page where they can interact with the community and read inspiring stories. (Stories can be a part of 6 months roadmap)

Key learnings

This challenge was super motivating for me to increase my awareness for small design problems we face from day to day. I believe we shouldn’t be satisfied with the existing solutions without questioning them and trying to constantly improve them even if we fail many times during this process.