Parks Navigator
Accessible navigation for Ontario Park goers
Duration: 3 months (2019 & 2020)
Team: 4 project owners, 3 design teams
Role: Project owner, strategy (2019)
Find a park with your needs
Download park data for offline use and customize your preferences
Exlore what’s around
See what activities the park has to offer and your surrounding amenities
Go on hike
Not all trails a created equal. Discover the ones that suit your appetite.
Went offline? pay no minds
Traverse around with peace of mind, even when there’s no signal
Navigating Ontario parks can be frustrating for those without experience or those with accessibility needs.
This is true for hiking trails and for navigating around the park as a whole. Certain areas are too steep, do not have wheelchair access, or have unclear pathways.
Intrigued by this problem, Ben, Brendan, Colin, and I teamed up to find a solution.
Design, but also not design
The rule for the project dictates that the director team—us—can’t get involved with design execution, but must direct design teams to do so throughout 3 sprints.
4 designers would be randomly chosen for each design team, effective for 3 weeks. Their group dynamics and collaboration effectiveness were up to luck.
Strategizing a plan
We’ve spent 3.5 years at school practicing design, but being limited only to project direction was a challenge that none of us had experience with.
This level of ambiguity was a perfect breeding ground for chaos, so we knew we needed to be strategic and flexible.
A skillset inventory helped us optimize and distribute our role as co-directors.
Ben - Facilitation
Great at communication and diffusing tough situations. Incredibly versatile to fill in gaps wherever needed.
Colin - Ideation
Amazing at raising energy level around discussions. His infectious optimism also kept the team going even when morale was low.
Brendan - Project Management
Great at optimizing tasks and workflow. A decision maker that takes initiative to ensure good work gets done on time.
Kiet - Strategy
I looked for insights and relayed that awareness back to the team, provided analysis, and suggested strategies for our next move.
Our strategy was to play by ears, keeping the project scope and requirements specific enough for direction, but loose enough for the designers to have creative freedom and autonomy.
Falling flat on our face
Time constraints and other more important projects pressured us into committing the most rookie design mistake—jumping into a solution.
We created a brief that wasn’t what we planned—prescribing our 1st design team a solution but still somehow asking them to do research(?).
Combined with a lack of communication, this led to subpar productivity and quality of the work we needed. The research wasn’t real, and the wireframes were way off. We didn’t find any of the deliverables usable, but that was on us.
Pivot or commit?
We wasted the first sprint and now have 3 options to choose from:
Change the project problem space and scope because we’re mad lads.
Keep the problem space, but do it right this time. PROPER DESIGN PROCESS!
Commit to what we planned, and let the next design team wing it.
Anyone in their right mind (and guts) will probably go for option 2, so that’s what we did, but with a few changes to avoid repeating the same mistake.
A leap of faith…
Redo research and wireframe would cut our planned schedule by 1/3—a huge risk!
Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” —So we did just that and chucked the old plan into the bin.
We believed that a good, validated lo-fi concept has a better chance of winning than a pretty (useless) mockup anyway.
So what’s your strategy now, then, you say? 🤔
Well, it’s quite simple, really:
Focus on communicating the problem space and vision over the solution.
Treat designers as strategic consultants, not design monkeys.
Ask earnestly for help, and stay aligned on what can be done reasonably.
Communicate often, offering support whenever needed.
It might sound obvious but trust me, for us students, these are alien concepts.
…that paid off handsomely!
The team interviewed actual parkgoers to understand major pain points when traversing around:
Minor frustrations can have major impacts on visitors’ self-esteem and affect the group’s experience.
Lack of clarity about the surrounding environment can make getting situated a major challenge.
“Finding washrooms and change rooms is tough in the night-time, and really hard when all the trees and surroundings look the same.” - Tomi
Aware that signal loss is a common issue in most parks, the team focused on offline navigation. The concept assumed physical markers are placed at key locations, such as trail entrances, to be scanned and have the location locally updated.
Key requirements
Allow visitors to find what park facilities are available and how to get there.
Allow visitors to find trail information, and stay informed of where they are situated.
A way for visitors to navigate when data/GPS is lost.
Designed with the visitor’s accessibility needs in mind.
So… is this really a valid concept?
With the final sprint, we wanted to validate the concept's idea and refine the wireframes. We onboarded new designers with the same approach and led extensive focus on usability testing.
We found great insights but had little time to take action. With only 2 days to prepare a submission brief, we made do with what we had and pray.
We didn’t expect to win anything, but somehow did
Knowing we’d be competing with other universities and colleges, we were surprised to receive news that we’d win 3rd place.
To put it in context, the format for this project was a pilot for our program so most teams struggled and we were the only team (out of 24) in our school to win.
We also got special recognition from Arc’Teryx, who was part of the judging panel.
Was this just dumb luck?
Maybe. Maybe not.
For what it’s worth, we also received the highest grade of all teams for this project. It wasn’t because we had the best concept or the most polished deliverables, but we got that this project was all about collaboration, and that was what we did.
We… I… learned that design doesn’t always have to be about design-ing. Seeing beyond that, adapting through successes and failures is what truly matters.
Putting a nice wrap
It feels anti-climatic to end on this note but people graduated and moved on with life. I decided to pick up where it left off and improve the designs like it’s a real app (and show people I can design for mobile too):
Change QR scanning to manual check-ins to update offline location
Add park selection, preference selection
Flesh out other details
And with that, I can go to sleep happy. ✌️