Riparian

Project Overview

Client: Riparian Paddlesports, an early stage outdoors startup
Industry: Outdoor Recreation
Timeline: 8 weeks (2022)
My Role: Product Designer

The Project

Riparian is a weather and fitness tracking app for paddlesports enthusiasts, focusing on the safety and community of river and lake trails.

The Problem

Riparian’s users need a way to discover weather impacts ahead of planned water explorations, connect their trip to weather impacts, and communicate current conditions to the paddlesport community.

The Goal

We will know this to be true when we see Riparian users chronicling their trips on the app, giving other members of the community current conditions on different waterways.

User Personas, Journeys, and Flows

Creating realistic personas was vital to designing Riparian with real users in mind; these personas informed what a user’s journey might look like, resulting in streamlined user flows displaying key application navigation.

Sitemap and Card Sorting

Iterating upon sitemap designs, requesting user feedback through card sorting, and revising based upon pain points and opportunities has set Riparian up for success.

Low to Mid-Fidelity Prototyping

With a polished sitemap in place, Riparian is set for prototyping; the key features in development revolve around finding new trails, creating bookmark groups to save these trails, and tracking weather alerts. The Trail Overview is displayed below, with all key features shown in the design iteration section.

Low to Mid-Fidelity Prototyping

The translation from low-fidelity to mid-fidelity was completed successfully, now Riparian is set for the shift to interactive prototypes; this still focuses on the three key features, adding the onboarding and login process as an additional flow.

The prototype can be accessed here:

Usability Testing

After creating a usability test script and conducting tests with six participants, we now need to organize and act upon the results; these will let us to reinforce Riparian’s intuitive user experience.
Key insights show Riparian functions effectively, with a few areas of confusion to be resolved for weather tracking.

Preference Test

With larger usability issues discovered and resolved, we can now look into the process of finer-tuned design decisions via preference tests.

Design Iterations

Riparian has gone through quite the design journey! Let’s take a look at the evolution from low to high fidelity of the app’s key features.

Feature: Trail Overview

The trail overview feature has been well-received from the start; iterations here largely relate to enhancing content displayed at each level of navigation.

Feature: Bookmarks

Iterating upon the creation of bookmark groups has also been fairly straightforward. The flow has changed based on user feedback on where they would arrive upon creating a bookmark group, while the modals have evolved to give users more flexibility.

Feature: Weather

Weather has seen the greatest benefits from iteration. The initial designs were clumsy for many users, who had a difficult time navigating through the flow. The current iteration clearly communicates how users can enable, disable, and view these life-saving alerts.

Design Documentation

Finally, we move onto the design language system. This ensures other designers, developers, and stakeholders can understand how Riparian’s design functions, as well as how they can create new functions or features.