Florida Keys Overseas Heritage Trail - Integrated Experience Application

HCI 440 – Intro to User Centered Design Project – Depaul University

The Florida Keys Overseas Heritage Trail features more than 70 miles of existing trail that is paved in segments along a planned, 106-mile corridor from Key Largo to Key West. The purpose of this project was to make an interactive application that would afford the user the ability to interact digitally with the existing features of the trail.

The diversity and length of the trail warrants the use of an integrated experience application due to the complexity and richness of experience along the journey. The experience could be enhanced with information relating to the historic and ecological significance of sites along the route.

This was a team project conceived by myself and carried out through many UX design stages within a design group.

Analysis

I had initially drawn up some storyboards that dealt with the persona of the ‘avid user’ vs. the ‘casual user’ to win over my group mates for the application concept. These dealt with cyclists covering a lot of distance vs. a casual user driving to the trail and walking a stretch of it. These helped to explain the potential various uses of this application.

When completed, the group began by creating a few UX brainstorming artifacts on whiteboards such as affinity diagrams and contextual inquiry exercises to get a scope of what we wanted to deal with regarding the affordances available for the application. This led to concept maps and flow charts for the greater conceptual system. Through these exercises, we learned that we were focusing on creating an overall Yelp for the trail. We concluded that we wanted to significantly narrow down the affordances and focus only on what the trail primarily provides the user.

Content

We worked on the basic interface design layout in Illustrator to help us organize the overall feel for the application before we constructed the Balsamiq low-fidelity prototype.

This isn’t a typical design process order, but the group was slightly confused on the primary functionalities of the application. This exercise helped to clarify the purpose for some group members.

Prototyping

We did a quick paper prototype of a short happy path with 10 users and below were the documented major usability issues we discovered before we began creating the Balsamiq low-fidelity prototype.

We created a low fidelity paper prototype in Balsamiq that was based on the results of our various sketching exercises and initial interface design. We wanted to cover some of the major application happy paths to get an idea of how users would react to the basic functionality. Below were the tasks grouped into 2 separate image galleries. The first gallery includes 1 highly detailed trip task and the second has 3 other smaller tasks.

An “Avid User” setting up a detailed trip after signing into their account and adding specific interests.
Creating a long trip while signed-in using the planner by mile markers.
Selecting a short trip without signing in.
Selecting a trip involving a picnic within the settings page.

Given the time allotted for this project, this was the final prototype iteration.