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Whale Trail App Design

Designing an app for whale watching trips.

Whale Trail is a series of sites to view marine mammals along the Pacific Coast, as the sightings follow the Puget Sound. The app will guide you through your next cruise with live notifications of attractions around you and help you explore the best sightings areas around Washington state. Download the app to learn fun facts about the whales you spot on your trip, keep yourself entertained with our educational whale trivia, and enter a raffle for your next whale watching.

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Introducing Whale Trail App
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Context

Over 13 million people across over 100 countries go whale watching every year. In Washington state alone, whale watching is considered one of the top attractions. Whale watching trips benefits individual, as well as marine science community. 

  • For watchers, whale watching trips allow people to enjoy the spectacle of whales and dolphins in their natural environment and offers the opportunity to learn.

  • For marine scientists, the cruises provide a research platform for scientists to collect opportunistic data on the behavior and ecology of whales and dolphins and help to create a network of observers who can report whales or dolphins in distress to trained and permitted responders .

Task

To help passengers keep themselves entertained on those long journeys and engage more with the experience, the app is meant to provide meaningful information about their trip and marine environment.

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For the purposes of this project, the app was supposed to have two mandatory features: display information about an individual whale and display sightings in the local area. Additionally, the elective features I've chosen for the project after conducting user research: 1) Info about individual species 2) Info about the current trip 3) Feedback and raffle.

Development

The project encompassed all steps of the UX design, starting with topic and user research, finishing with the app Figma prototype and short advertisement video. Below are the steps taken during the design process of the app.

1. Personas

Starting with topic and user research, I have first created two personas for the whale watching trips, primary (Matthew) and secondary (Mary). On top of the persona cards, primary persona also included a short personal statement written from their perspective.

Both persona features are selected based on topic research, demographics data and statistics of whale watching trips in the Washington area.

2. Interview and User Journey

After understanding the personas for whale watching trips, I have reached out to a person who closely resembles my primary persona and recently went on a whale watching trip. In a 30 minutes interview I was able to gather the needs and challenges of the user and create a user journey and four user stories based on that experience. 

3. Mockups

As a next step, I have created 2 UI packages for the app, both addressing four user stories but different in their approach. Each slide represents one flow to complete the user story, i.e. to complete a task the user wants to do. Each screen represents a new app screen the user would see navigating through the app.

UI Package 1

UI Package 1

UI Package 2

UI Package 2

4. User Testing

User Test Summary Report (2).jpg
User Test Summary Report (1).jpg

5. Final Prototype

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