faceted navigation and Trip PlanneR

Information Architecture, UX Research, Design • 2011-2012, 2015

More recently, I developed a concept piece for REI called Trip Planner. My goal was to design a data-rich platform similar to the retail website that could serve to facilitate the planning and management of REI customer camping trips. 

A Brief Case Study: Faceted Navigation on REI.com

Back in the day, REI customers were not given many options for refining their searches. This resulted in a less-than-perfect shopping experience, and possible abandonment. We wanted to fix that. If you've ever shopped in one of REI's retail stores, you know that they have friendly sales staff who go out of their way to help you find the perfect gear and advice. We wanted to match REI's online experience to that of their retail stores. It needed to be more personal. If a customer wanted a blue backpack that weighed less than five pounds and fit their long torso, we wanted to give them all the tools necessary to find it.

Leveraging data from search and traffic logs, and through observational user research, we set out to change the way customers found products on REI.com. I took part in deep dives and competitive analyses to determine category-specific product attributes, and worked within a small team of Taxonomists to determine tagging strategies for the 16,000 products in REI's catalogue at that time. We set up a data governance team, and I worked directly with stakeholders from our Master Data and Product Information teams to instrument and populate the product data. I collaborated with a team of Experience Designers and Architects to work out interactions, look and feel, order of appearance, and visual refinement indicators (breadcrumbs). See before and after shots, below.

CONCEPT PIECE: REI TRIP PLANNER 

The Challenge

In a recent market research study regarding camping in the United States, participants cited lack of time due to work and family commitments as the main reason for reducing their time spent outdoors on camping trips. REI wants to help remove this and other barriers so that more people can enjoy camping in the great outdoors, purchase more products through REI, and become more involved in environmental stewardship.

My Role

For this project, I played the roles of UX Researcher and UX Designer, and completed the following activities within a two-week timeline:

Tools Used

Sketch, Balsamiq, Illustrator, Omnigraffle, Optimal Sort

I quickly conducted eight interviews, a card sort, and developed a persona based on my research. Most interviewees mentioned that lack of knowledge and education about the area they wished to camp discouraged them from planning more camping trips. Group planning dynamics, permitting, and packing lists were also common pain points. 

I walked through the process of  planning a camping trip with each of the individuals I interviewed, and asked about any tools or websites they typically use to do their planning. Their answers helped me frame a comparative analysis of similar products and websites, and I plotted out the prevailing mental model for trip planning, which I used to establish a scenario, user flows, and the IA for my solution. 

The SOLUTION

I designed a new feature for REI's website called "Trip Planner." Using Trip Planner, REI customers can research, compare, select, and get permits for a camping destination based on their activity preferences and criteria. Users may also invite companions to join their trip and help with planning. My design includes an interactive trip-packing checklist that all campers can access for 1) awareness of what to bring, 2) assignment of group items to specific people, 3) shopping list creation, 4) in-site purchasing flow for any items that can be purchased from REI.

I wireframed the solution in Balsamiq and conducted usability tests with a clickable Balsamiq prototype. I iterated the prototype based on the usability tests, and produced a higher fidelity version of the location research portion of the solution using Sketch. You'll notice that I stayed true to the existing look and feel of REI's faceted navigation, but made slight modifications to the global navigation to accommodate the Trip Planner feature. 

USABILITY FINDINGS AND NEXT STEPS

As is always the case with usability testing, I was pleasantly surprised with the amount and quality of user feedback I received upon testing Trip Planner.

The main takeaway was this: Trip Planner addresses the challenge that was presented in the market research study , and suits the needs of our persona, Sarah Graham. Sarah fits well within one segment of the market (namely, more experienced campers/backpackers), but Trip Planner may not work as well for individuals who would like to plan trips around other outdoor activities (e.g. biking, kayaking, snowboarding).  Future iterations of Trip Planner would need to be altered to accommodate more use cases and mental models.

I received feedback about cosmetic details, faceted navigation and filter options, and the overall user flow that I was able to quickly integrate into the prototype. The checklists feature was troublesome for users, and this element needs quite a bit more iteration and testing. There are several competitors (Mammut's "Packing List" app, TripIt's "PackPoint") who specialize in list making, and it would be worth doing a comparative analysis with these and other candidates to see what they're doing well.

Other recommendations for next steps include gamifying or incentivizing users to write trip/location reviews-- usability participants cited the reviews as very helpful in selecting a location, but most do not write location reviews after returning from a trip. Furthermore, the login experience would probably be more effective if placed after the user has selected a location, as it would only be necessary to login in order to create and plan trips, but users may prefer to explore locations without being deterred by a login screen.