📍🌳 Intuitive Local Discovery By Bridging the Information Gap
Project Details
- Title: Parks & Recreation Service Locator App
- Year of Creation: 2024
- Class Project: Created for User Experience and Interface Design (Spring 2024)
- Team: Solo Project (Sole Designer)
- Role: UX Researcher, UX/UI Designer
- Media: Figma (Digital Wireframing and Interactive Prototyping), Canva (Logo and Image Editing)
Objective
To design a mobile hub for services offered by the Parks and Recreation department that bridges the gap between community resources and residents by modernizing fragmented information architecture and improving the discoverability of local park services.
This project involved designing a dedicated mobile application to resolve usability friction points within a local Parks and Recreation website. Motivated by personal challenges with the existing site’s navigation, I designed a solution focused on discoverability, service accessibility, and real-time updates.
The app streamlines how residents discover parks and services by reorganizing the complex information architecture into a searchable, user-friendly interface. By prioritizing “current-state” data and intuitive navigation, I transformed a high-friction web experience into a reliable community resource, ensuring users can effectively find accurate facility details and program information.
The Design Process
1. Empathize
Understanding User Friction Points:
- Responsiveness Bugs: Though the Fairfield Parks and Recreation website is technically responsive, it is not optimized for mobile, and much of the information and images are bunched into a single column, forcing users to scroll endlessly.
- Poor Discoverability: The list of parks is not very noticeable and exists as a small link.
- Missing Visual Assets: The list of parks includes some helpful information but no images.
- Lack of Basic Filtering: There is no way to filter the list to search only for specific types of parks, such as dog parks or nature trails.
2. Define
Research
To get a better idea of the typical information architecture structure of other parks pages, I reviewed various parks pages ranging from the National Parks Service website to other Parks and Recreation Department websites around the U.S.
User Personas
3. Ideate
4. Prototype
Wireframes
Prototype
5. Testing
I utilized Figma’s prototyping features to conduct usability testing. By observing how users interacted with the low-fidelity flow, I was able to identify any pain points, gather important insights, and resolve navigation hurdles. This iterative process culminated in a comprehensive high-fidelity prototype, which integrates the final brand identity with a fully interactive user experience.
The Final Product
Feature Highlights: Mobile App Architecture
- Personalized Accounts & Community Engagement: Integrated a structured “Create Account” ecosystem that incentivizes user retention by allowing residents to save favorite trails, catalog dog-friendly parks, and bookmark upcoming local events.
- Filtered Quick-Search Anchors: Amenity icons (such as Nature Trails, Dog Parks, etc.) are placed at the top of the search interface to reduce search friction, allowing users to find critical park features in a single tap.
- Persistent Bottom Navigation: Engineered a sticky bottom nav bar to establish a predictable, thumb-zone friendly navigation system across five essential views:
- Home: Instant return to the central user dashboard
- Calendar: A dedicated timeline for high-priority updates, community holiday events, and scheduled park closures.
- Account Hub: A dynamic gateway that instantly routes authenticated users to their profile or directs guests to a friction-free sign-in pipeline.
- Extended Menu (…): An ellipsis trigger that expands an off-canvas slide-out menu containing critical fallback actions and accessible Help documentation
- Ubiquitous Top Navigation Controls: Guarantees that essential navigational recovery and search mechanisms remain perpetually accessible.
- Map: Displays proximity-based park facilities and amenities utilizing the user’s real-time geographic.
Continuous Post-Launch Research, Assistive Technology Compliance, and Real-World Field Testing
