Case Study: Washington Trails Association

Project: 2019 AIGA Seattle Changemaker Series

Date: May 2019 - September 2019

Role: Visual Designer

The AIGA Seattle Changemaker Series unites teams of creative professionals with nonprofits and social change organizations to use design thinking, sustainable frameworks, and creative tools to help advance their mission.

My 6 person team was partnered with Washington Trails Association (WTA). For 4 months, we worked as a mini human-centered design agency for WTA to solve for what they believed to be their biggest challenge: How might we encourage hikers to respect the spaces that they recreate in?

Ultimately, we leveraged WTA’s website for its broad reach, search optimization, and useful hiking guide. We generated: 1) UX redesigns of their hike profile pages to encourage hikers to better prepare prior to reaching the trailhead and 2) a consolidated version of the targeted research that we had done over the course of the project.

CHALLENGE STATEMENT

How might we encourage hikers to respect the spaces that they recreate in?

To start off the project, AIGA Seattle hosted a Changemaker Series Workshop Weekend where we got to spend time team-building, meeting our partner organization, and learning human-centered design tools.

Shortly after the workshop weekend, we had an onsite visit with WTA where we:

interviewed our org liaisons as well as 3 other WTA employees
led a stakeholder mapping exercise
defined what success might look like

In our first meeting with WTA, we heard a phrase that would stick with us forever: "Dogs, Poop, and Trash."

WTA explained that the biggest pain points for hikers on trails were: 1. Off-leash dogs, 2. Dog poop left on the side of the trail, and 3. Litter on the trail.

We learned that WTA’s challenge statement for us was really a result of research they’d already done and stemmed from the idea hypothesis that if hikers are “respecting and valuing lands they recreate in,” then there will be less trash, dog poop, and dogs off leash on the trails and thus hikers have a better overall experience.

For the next phase of our research, we sought to test the assumptions of the first part of their hypothesis to see if dogs, poop, and trash are, in fact, the main pain points for hikers. We also wanted to explore what respecting the land might look like from a hiker’s perspective. We felt that we needed to do our own preliminary research in this area to clarify and challenge our original “how might we” statement.

Workshop Weekend

Practicing ideation strategies during the workshop

Stakeholder mapping at our onsite with WTA

USER RESEARCH:

We generated a list of interview questions based on our goals of challenging our ‘how might we’ statement and finding out more about people’s on-trail pain-points.

On a sunny Saturday morning, we broke out into pairs of two and conducted interviews with around 100 people on the Trailhead Direct bus as well as the Mount Si and Little Si trailheads. We audio recorded our 5 minute interview conversations, collected basic demographics for everyone we spoke with, and debriefed as we were collecting these data. Each pair wrote a short report of findings, we compared reports and summarized our insights to better inform our next steps.

Existing signage at Mount Si's Trailhead

KEY INSIGHTS:

WTA’s assumptions about poop, trash, and dogs were, in fact, the most often cited pain points that came up in our interviews. One individual (that we didn’t get the chance to interview) had such a visceral reaction to the dog poop issue that when they came down off the trail after their hike, went to their car for paper and a pen, and came back to scribble down an angry note about the dog poop on the trail and tacked it up to the trailhead board.

When asked if individuals would identify as a “hiker”, a greater number of users than we expected were hesitant to call themselves hikers citing that they didn’t go on enough hikes, hadn’t been hiking that long, or didn’t have enough or specialized gear.

Most users described their experience of ‘having a good hike’ as one that was physically difficult, like an athletic activity.
While some users did cite signage on trails as resources for “how to be a responsible hiker” most said they learned the principles of “pack in, pack out” and other ethos from their families, friends, or more experienced hikers.
The vast majority of everyone we spoke to had either visited WTA.org prior to their hike or had used it in the past to prepare for previous hikes.

ADDITIONAL CHALLENGES

WTA does not own any trails or land— different land managers do. This means that any idea we came up with to address trash and dog poop on the trails, couldn’t include an intervention point physically at the trailhead.

Even if WTA could make physical changes to the trailheads, such as additional signage or adding trash cans, because of the number of trails in Washington State, the upkeep of tending to trash bins or installing different signage would be extremely costly.

This led our team into discussions around a hiker’s user journey and alternate intervention points as well as further talks with our WTA liaisons.

“Most people aren’t assholes.”

Or at least that’s what we liked to tell ourselves. Most of hikers leaving trash or dog poop on the trail didn’t go out of their way to try to damage the trails or harm the environment.

Because our solution couldn’t be a physical addition to the trail, we opted to focus our ideation around educational opportunities. We also narrowed our scope down from “all hikers on Washington trails” to “novice level hikers on Washington trails”—people who simply might not know to bring a Tupperware container in their daypack for their trash or used dog poop bags.

SOLUTION:

We created a simple, low-barrier, interactive checklist that could be added to WTA.org hiking guide pages.

Low-fidelity prototype testing at our last check-in before the final showcase

DELIVERABLES:

Our final deliverable was a consolidated version of all of our research which included:

Analogous spaces communications audit
Messaging suggestions for our preparedness checklist solution
Mockups of our how and where we envisioned our checklist being implemented on WTA’s website— this was done in 3 tiers that ranged from easiest to most complicated to implement based on their site’s current limitations
Blue sky ideas to spark more ideas that WTA can use at a later date

WTA’s SEO is incredible; we found that if someone searches for nearly any Washington hiking trail, WTA’s hiking guide page for that trail is almost always within the first few hits if not the very first link. This means that more often than not, hikers of all levels end up on a hiking guide page. We used this as an intervention point to add in content about preparedness. That way, novice hikers are given some information that they might not know and frequent hikers are given a reminder of some items that they might not always remember or think to bring.

At the end of the project, me and one of my teammates presented our findings and deliverable at the final showcase.

Changemaker Team

UX Designer
Ruban Hussain

Copywriter & Designer
Scott Brown

Marketing Specialist
Sara Cornish

Researcher
Leah Isquith-Dicker

Visual Designer
Kylee Lisook

Project Manager
Lorena Huang Liu