BC Marine Trails P
Mobile and web design for safe and sustainable water-based public recreation.
Overview
British Columbia Marine Trails is a non-profit organization whose mission is to build, protect and promote a public network of marine trails with minimal impact on the environment. The B.C. coastline neighbours from Seattle to Alaska on the Pacific West Coast.
My goal is to design an app and website that will add value to the stakeholders and marine users. While helping them build, protect and promote a public network of marine trails with minimal impact on the environment through these new digital channels.
Role
UX Research Lead: Stakeholders to align goals and direction, experts research, First Nations research and kayakers research.
Timeline
Everything in this page so far has taken around 20 days of work
Tools:
Notion, Miro, Interviews,Research
Content Research
When I was brought into the project, they where almost in development. However, after asking a few questions I realized the team lacked the research needed to understand BCMT’s goals and their clients needs so that we can successfully design an app that will add company and user value.
Therefore, I gathered the following information to be able to talk to my manager ( the IT Director) so that we can backtrack and start with UX research.
Google Analytics Data
To start, I looked at the google analytics of the site. Doing this helps me set a starting point and understand their current users and some of their behaviours.
Current Mobile App
Next, I talk to the person previously in charge of the app to know why they had taken the direction they did and find their knowledge gaps.
Understanding BCMT
Finally, I talked to the IT director and showed him the gaps, suggesting the importance of gathering more data to validate our design decisions, starting by aligning with the stakeholders to gain support and clearly define BCMT’s main problems.
Establishing a Process
With a green light from my manager, my next step was to outline our process to increase the efficiency and clarity of the team. Therefore, I set up notion as a project management tool to keep everything in one place and helped the project manager establish our next steps. Together we set up our goals, milestones and process. You can see the work we did in notion in this video.
Stakeholder Interviews
Finally we had our stakeholders interviews to gain alignment, discover their issues, business goals and their objectives. It was key to do one on one interviews to be able to hear everyones POV with out the influence of others. One on one talks ensures them that they are being heard, it is also easier to get buying from one than from a group. Once they are all in agreement, we are able to give them the results as a group but by then, they are all aware of our new goals and in agreement with our direction facilitating our process.
Otter: Interview with Stakeholder
After our interviews where done we gather all of our info into Miro for collaboration and to visually see and divide each of their goals and objectives.
The Stakeholders Main Challenges
From our interviews we realized that their main problem is that BCMT relies on the quality and quantity of data they can gathered on each of the sites and traffic of the trails to receive grants from the Government of British Columbia. This info is currently only being collected by a couple of them on specific boat outings. Their secondary problem is finding alignment and growing relationships with with First Nations as they are the ones authorizing public access to many of this marine sites.
Next Steps
Experts Research
Because BCMT government grants are given based on the quality of the data they provide talking to a grant expert will give us insight to know what data is important.
First Nations are who approve some of the sites for public access. Therefore, we need to know what is most important to them to align with their goals, help build relationships, trust and provide value through our digital channels.
BCMT Member Research
BCMT hasn’t communicated with their members in a while. This is why we will be conducting a survey to all of BCMT members and try to get 200 responses to get some good quantitative data.
Once we know who kayaks, we will conduct interviews as well with Kayakers to understand their pain points, behaviours and motivations.
Kayaking Research
For now, based on our primary findings we believe kayakers will be a good group to start focusing our MVP research on.
We will interview various groups, from different zones in BC with different levels of expertise.
Finally we will find the intersection between stakeholders goals, First Nations, the BC Grants and the kayakers to finally take the right steps to create an MVP that ads value.
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