Background
RA Camping app is a camping app where users can search for available camp and RV sites, yurts, cabins and more in state, federal, and private parks and campgrounds across the US, filter by site features, view campground and site details, and reserve selected campsite. The project was initiated by the product team to improve the ratings which were 1.6 and 1.8 on the App Store and Play Store respectively. The ideation of the project was carried out by the product manager and the UX Team (2 UX designers including myself and visual designer). We first tried to understand the potential root cause(s) of the low ratings, however, that was a challenging task since we did not have a budget for research but had an upcoming deadline to release an updated version into the market.
Defining the Problems to Solve
We started with the internal review and brainstorming sessions. We conducted expert reviews and then reviewed the current version of the app along with the reviews it received on app stores to list possible improvement areas.
Following the discussions we had internally within the Product and UX team about the potential solutions for the identified problems and listed blue sky features for future releases, I was assigned to different projects since the company had several products but only 2 UX designers on the team. While I was busy working on different projects, the team started working on UX deliverables. The direction given by the product team was to enhance selected screens and flows instead of re-designing the project from scratch. In my absence, the information architecture was updated, the homepage was redesigned to include card-based layout to replace map view, and a dashboard design studies were started which would display the upcoming reservations. Since I was still in close contact with the team following their work, realizing there is no way to validate our assumptions or designs due to the lack of research budget, I started looking for ways to gather data to support the design decisions for this and upcoming camping projects.
Taking Initiative to Understand User Behavior
I initiated a research project on my personal time not only to assist the team with insights into camper behaviour but also with the hope to show the management that the data we had has incredible potential and investing in research could bring huge advantages to the business. I reviewed the feedback received from ReserveAmerica.com surveys. Even though ReserveAmerica.com and RA Camping apps potentially have had different user profiles, they were both fed by the same APIs and many pages on RA Camping app were initially designed to reflect the exact same details on ReserveAmerica.com. I included the website feedback in the research to see if there were concepts to investigate for the ongoing RA Camping app enhancement project.
There were 2 major issues shared on the feedback forms that could help us understand what our users were looking for:
- Many mentioned that they needed to book multiple sites for friends/family, however, they could not (there are business rules in use that prevent that).
- Many could not find sites of their choice either because some could not find filters or some thought it was hard to figure out which sites were available
Even though there were quite a few comments that addressed frustrations, over 90% of the users rated their experience over 8/10.
I also ran a data research project on the reservation records from previous years (PII was excluded). This research revealed some important highlights. I found out that about 70% of our users were booking sites for 2-6 people staying for 2-3 days. About one-third of them were bringing 2 cars and planning approximately 3 months in advance. Additionally, almost half of our users book twice a year. Moreover, only 30% of the campers were booking reservations in different states than they reside in. (I presented the findings of this research to multiple departments and received very high praise even though the scope of it was limited due to lack of resources I had. Discussions have been going on regarding continuing on this project to extend its scope, however, due to budget considerations, it has not been addressed yet.)
The Design Process
Following the completion of my other projects, I was reassigned to this project. At that time, the team had already updated the information architecture and started working on the dashboard concept. The idea was to provide users with details regarding their upcoming reservations. This would be a summary board. In the lack of a testing budget, I ran guerilla usability testing reviews with especially participants over 40 years old as I had some accessibility concerns due to the text size on the card components. Most users had a hard time reading the labels because of the text size. I also realized that the contrast value of between the dark background and thin font style hindered the readability. These findings helped me revisit the dashboard designs in collaboration with our visual designer.
As I was reviewing the progress of the work in my absence, I realized there were visual inconsistencies among pages and design elements. Working on isolated flows instead of addressing the app as a whole created a tunnel vision and caused these discrepancies. I reviewed all flows and pages available on the app, listed the points that needed to be fixed, the visual designer in our team created a style guide to be shared with our development team, and the product management prioritized the issues to be fixed as we progress.
I also worked on the undiscoverable site type filter issue. The way the filter panel designed was reflecting the way facility/park configurations. Site type information was hidden under a couple of layers of higher-level details regarding the facility and the site categories. Unless the user understands the hierarchy that business follows, it would be unlikely to figure out where to find site details. This was potentially the reason why many users said they wished there was a site type filter available. Following our conversations with our product and architecture team, it was obvious that within the scope of this project, it wouldn’t be possible to update the information hierarchy of the facility configurations. We realized that we could exclude the site type out of the filter panel to display all available filter types on the site list view without a major code change. I designed a new dropdown menu on the site list page.
I was assigned to design new flows of reviewing access codes through the reservation details and reservation editing capabilities such as self-checking-in, cancelling and paying balances. The access code concept was about providing the users with gate codes to enter the facility. These codes were generated upon the purchase of the reservation and would be read-only information as part of your reservation details. The rest of the editing capabilities were very straight-forward flows which may include transactions. Initially, the idea we discussed was to include these in the reservation details page, however, these actions except for the cancellation would be very convenient if they are easily accessible without having to drill down until the reservation details page. That’s why we added a new section on the dashboard cards on the homepage for upcoming reservations with available actions. If access codes are available for your reservation, you can access it from the homepage. Also if you have balances to pay, or self-check-in available, the entry points are all readily available on the homepage. Since we knew from the research I conducted that many campers going camping with friends and family and bringing multiple cars, we also introduced the “Add to Wallet” feature for IOS so they can share the access codes and reservation details easily.
Lastly, the app did not prompt for receiving feedback or ratings before. Since the total number of reviews and ratings we received reflected only about 1-2% of the overall users actually using the app, we included the contact and rate options in the menu which helped us receive more feedback directly. In addition to that, we introduced a rate-us prompt at the end of the reservation flow as that was the happy path that the users have to complete for business to succeed.
Results
The app updates have been released over 2018 and 2019 as the features were completed. The ratings have increased dramatically on both Google Play (4.5 as of March 2020) and App Store (4.8 as of March 2020). There are still upcoming design updates and new features that are scheduled for 2020, however I am proud of all the work we have done as the UX and Product Team and looking forward to collecting more qualitative and quantitative data to improve the booking and camping experience for our users even further.