REI CLImb

Revolutionizing Climbing through Partner Finding App

Revolutionizing the climbing community by connecting climbing partners with the click of a button

Role

UX Researcher

UX Designer

Timeline

3 weeks

Oct 2023

Tools

Figma

Notion

Skills

User Research

Interaction Design

Visual Design

Accessibility

Climbing Like You’ve Never Seen Before

Climbing is known to be on of the most fierce sports in the world, but many climbers seem to have a common problem of not being able to find people to climb with easily or safely. In this project we introduce you to an app that climbers never even knew they needed. Finely balancing the needs of REI and the climbing community, my team and I carved a new path for climbers in our 3 week design sprint and revolutionized the climbing world as we know today.

Meet the Team

  • Coco Zhang

    UX/UI Designer

  • Karan Kumar

    UX/UI Designer

  • Noelia Valle

    UX/UI Designer

  • Selena de Leon

    UX/UI Designer

Project Overview

The goal of this project was to design an experience for climbers that provided useful information every single day, regardless of whether a climber was climbing or not.

My Contributions

During this project I conducted user research, developed sketches and wireframes, defined flows, completed usability testing , as well as updated designs based on usability findings and accessibility.

Phase 01: The Set Up

When we began the project we knew we needed to learn more about REI and climbers before jumping in to our designs. We completed a feature analysis, competitive and comparative analysis, and user interviews to learn more about opportunities for REI and to understand climbers in the current climbing space.

Phase 02: Creating Lynn

Meet Lynn, the beginning climber. Lynn was a representation of our research findings and encompassed who we would create our designs for.

Lynn is a beginner climber eager to advance her skills and explore the climbing world. She loves to climb but lacks the guidance and encouragement that she needs to feel confident exploring her hobby.

She needed a structured way to navigate the dense information associated with climbing, an inclusive community, and most importantly someone she can climb with who she feels safe with to try new climbs with.

Phase 03: Solutions

At this part of our process we came back to what REI had asked us to create which was an experience for climbers that provided useful information every single day. We needed to start designing based off not only what Lynn (our research findings) needed but also what REI was looking for.

We focused our userflow on helping Lynn find climbing partners and ensured our sketches provided access to communities and real-time data and information.

After a few rounds of sketching in our design studio we took the best features from each sketch and came up with our mid-fidelity wireframes.

Testing our designs

We wanted to test our designs and see how users interacted with the app. We found all users were able to complete our two tasks of finding a partner to climb with today and filtering for other climbers that were online now, but we also found areas where we could update our designs.

Phase 04: Deliery

For our final delivery we focused on accessibility, style guides, and improving our prototype based on our usability testing.

Accessible Designs

We conduced a color contrast workshop to ensure compliance with accessibility standards. We found some of our buttons were not compliant and shifted our designs to contain more contrast

Style Guide

The rock climbing wall inspired our final style guide decisions. We incorporated REI’s current website style for familiarity but also introduced more vibrant colors to inspire a sense of challenge, friendship, and playfulness in our designs.

Updates based on usability testing

Through usability testing we found some areas that users had confusion on were the “Improve” section of our home page, an unclear “Online” Status of other climbers, not having the option to select “No Preference” when searching for partners, and removing of rating system of climbers.

01 Daily weather information

02 Finding a partner to climb with

03 Focus on community

04 Updated Improve Section

01 Choose climbing type & difficulty

02 Gender Preference

03 Select date and time

04 Gym or spot preference

Final Prototype

Future Iterations

In future iterations, we wanted to continue developing the improve, explore, and community sections of the app. We also would have loved to have another round of usability testing on our updated prototype, but overall were extremely proud of the app we created for the climbing community. It was an app that all of our users throughout testing were excited for and “couldn’t wait for the app to come to fruition.”

Team Learnings

During this project our team realized the importance of balancing both user and business needs when developing our app and the beauty of design studios. We had to pivot during our designs when realizing we needed the app to also incorporate information for users daily. And our design ended up becoming the best they could be when we incorporated key aspects of all of our designs. Dreamwork truly does make the dream work!

Want to learn more about our design process?

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