Arches National Park App
For this project, we were asked to design and prototype an app for a specific park. I choose to do Arches since I have some good memories tied with it.
I thought that the best way to start this project was to look at the current national park apps. I found that this was a great help in getting ideas of what I wanted to do or things the apps were doing that I thought should stay in my design. Here is a couple I looked at.
After looking through these four apps and seeing the features they offer I found some good guidance on how I wanted to proceed with my design.
I started with the landing page and navigation page being the same. I felt that the best selling point of a national park is the landscape captured by pictures. I wanted to use pictures as the links to pages with related content. This is what I had going for me in the early stages.
While this was a good start it was not the easiest place to design navigation between pages. I would have to add a hamburger menu icon to allow navigation between pages which was not going to show good consistency between pages.
After talking with my professor he gave me the advice to make the image links the landing page and the navigation page. So when you load up the app it shows beautiful pictures of the park and allows the user to choose where they want to go. I ended with the outcome shown below.
The next task I faced was making the information about the park more interactive. My developer's mind kicked and thought of the google maps API that would allow them to see the park on the map and the areas the surround it.
I also wanted to add in a 360 tour for a popular area and a photo gallery. I felt instead of throwing the information on the page with words and few pictures, finding ways to be interactive with the user was the better way to go.
Above are the examples of those interactions and the pages as a whole. Overall, I felt the design brought out the main pages the park wants people to focus on and then allowed the user to dive deeper according to their needs.
You can find the full prototype by following this link: