🌳 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 Designer, UI Designer
- Media: Figma (Digital Wireframing and Interactive Prototyping), Canva (Logo and Image Editing)
Objective
To design a responsive mobile application that bridges the gap between community resources and residents by modernizing fragmented information architecture and improving the discoverability of local park services.
Synopsis
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 find accurate facility details and program information with minimal cognitive effort.
Planning and Wireframing
Using Figma, I began the design process with low-fidelity wireframes to map out the core user flow and establish a hierarchy for the park locator services. These initial blueprints allowed me to focus on the Information Architecture without being distracted by visual elements, ensuring that the navigation addressed the primary pain points of data discoverability.
Once the skeleton of the app was established, 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 and resolve navigation hurdles before moving into high-fidelity design. This iterative process culminated in a comprehensive high-fidelity prototype, which integrates the final brand identity with a fully interactive user experience.
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 Parking, Bicycle Paths, and Gardens) 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.
- Location: Displays proximity-based park facilities and amenities utilizing the user’s real-time geographic.
- 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: Anchored a sticky header featuring a persistent Back button and a Search icon. This guarantees that essential navigational recovery and search mechanisms remain perpetually accessible.