UX Case Study: NSW National Parks
By: Emma Fouche
Tags: Nature, Website, Apps, Wildlife, UX

NSW National Parks App is unknown

Our next task was to ask specific questions with users using the NP website, throughout this exploration the NSW NP app appeared, neither of us had been exposed to this before, and 90% of our 32 survey respondents had never heard of the app before.

90% of survey respondents had never heard of the NSW National Parks app.

Avoiding the trap of “let’s make this an app”

This presented us with a trap many UX projects seem to fall into — should we just make an app? Further survey insights tell us no, as 60% more users had used the website rather than the app. Hence our decision early on, to create additional features to improve the existing site rather than re-inventing the chariot.

69% of survey respondents had used the website before.

Using photos to get the people outside

But with these initial keys, how would we discover what features to implement? My quest partner and I decided to make two separate initial prototypes, with different design inspirations, one with a card-style photo presentation, and another with a more box-style photo presentation. This allowed for A&B testing which then led us to base some of our visual design and flow off the Airbnb filtration structure and image cards.

We found that the images were best used when prioritised and given a lot of screen space.

Bring Photos to the Focal Point of our Quest

The construction of our Master File began by establishing two major features. As the website currently only contributes to the initial phases of a users’ journey into exploring a National Park, our quest team realised that we had to encapsulate the users’ experience through the site better. The first, and principal feature being “Find Inspiration” and the other being “Share Photos”. These features would provide solutions to our users’ problems in that they targeted the research phase of a users’ journey, and the return and share phase of their journey engaging with NSW NP.

Reasoning behind our feature additions.

Moments along the user journey we targeted.

Which characters are we designing for?

To tailor and to integrate our new features for someone, rather than no one, we developed two personas — these personas allowed us to have a strong focus on design for specific users, rather than for ourselves or no one in particular. Dan is in his 20s and reflects our most interviewed and surveyed demographics. Our secondary persona is Nat, busy mother and another common National Parks character.

Our personas, their goals and what they have in common.

If Users Flow, how do we?

For our next venture into solutioning for our constructed personas, together we conducted usability tests with two key tasks (one to search for inspiration for a hike, and the other to upload an image onto the site). With a low task completion rate of without clear hints/direction, it was clear the structure of the solution didn’t separate the two tasks enough. With higher fidelity designs we conducted more usability tests individually, to get more holistic practice as well as validate our prototype rather than generate ways to fix the designs. A massive increase and very promising going into the final steps of our quest.

There was a 50% increase of successful task completion rate after our changes.

On the path to success!

Nearing the end of the quest, we gathered back to compile all of our research and insights in order to validate our final prototype. We confirmed that our solution solved the problems of “confusing navigation” and “difficult to find inspiration for locations to visit”. Check out my video of a walk through of our Task 2.

The next Quest awaits: Favourites and Info

Our next steps for this project would be to add a ‘favourites’ function, as it was something mentioned near the end of our usability testing as a ‘nice to have’. This would help NSW NP have users come back to their page, and would help users to tick off their National Park bucket list! We would also find ways to integrate more of the NP information into some of the pages via simple iconography and pop ups, to ensure that our users are as knowledgeable, and inspired as possible when going out on their own quests!