School Project for University of Denver in collaboration with Janielle Burrage, Jen Christner, and Bonnie Gregory.

AllTrails Community Redesign

For my final project with University of Denver, we were given an extremely broad design challenge of finding a problem in an app or website that is popular in our region, the front range of Colorado. Immediately, my mind went to AllTrails. If you’re reading this, I’m sure you’ve used or at least heard of the popular hiking app used for planning, navigating, and sharing recreational trails.

Our next step was to see if there were any faults in the app, so we sent out surveys to our friends, family, and classmates who were local to the area. Conveniently enough, AllTrails was currently beta testing their new “Community” feature. Every single one of our surveys said that they would not be interested in this feature initially based on the fact that people weren’t open to going to remote locations with strangers and that the app was looking more like another social media platform instead of connecting yourself to friends and nature. When our team played around with it, we found the concerns to be even greater. For example, we found an older woman through the feature who was using the app to record her morning walks around her neighborhood revealing and sharing exactly where she lived likely unknowingly. This is not uncommon to other fitness apps like Strava, but the concern here was that the community feature was aiming you to connect with strangers.

We found our problem, so let’s make it better.

Narrowing our focus on the Community feature, we aimed our research on what people actually want out of a social hiking app. We found it was simply to achieve the same goals AllTrails is known for (planning, navigating, and sharing) but with the people you love. So, we did just that.