"How might we help hikers in Hong Kong easily locate accessible toilets along hiking routes?"
We are currently having several challenges of going to toilets during hiking in Hong Kong. Firstly, there are few toilets along the hiking route. In case you miss one, it may take hours to get to another toilet. Secondly, we do not have much information about the private toilets in small stores. Hence, the goal is to assist hikers to find the toilets easily during hiking .
During my research, there were 3 main competitors in Hong Kong. They were (1) Toilet Rush, (2) Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department (AFCD)’s website as well as (3) Google Map.
The Toilet Rush app is linked to the government’s public toilet database and allows users to add new toilets in order to expand their database. It enables users searching, adding toilets and commenting on the toilets.
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It displays all public toilets in the country parks which are sorted by district. It also provides a map for our reference.
It allows searching toilets within your current location by typing the toilet keyword.
With the information collected from the research, I conducted an interview with 3 people (one of them was a frequent hiker) by asking questions about going to public toilets as well as their feedback after using the Toilet Rush app.
"I want to find all the toilets along the route. It is inconvenient to search for locations one by one."
Hikers tended to plan for the hiking route and share it with friends. Hence, they could study the route and get a better understanding before hiking. Option for route search involving multipoint would be more convenient for hikers. After they search for the toilets along the route, they could save the route map and share with friends.
Inexperience hikers might miss the toilets along the way as they were unfamiliar with the trail. We could provide notification to users when they are near the toilet to help them find the way.
People wanted to find clean and hygienic toilets. Higher ratings implying better hygiene might help users to find desirable toilets. Including rating in the filter option could improve hikers toilet experience.
On the “Toilet Detail” page, it required user scrolling down the page to find the report and comment button. One interviewee did not even realize the comment button at the bottom of the page.
On the page of “Adding a New Toilet”, no rating and comment section was available. One of the reasons for user to add a new toilet was to give comments regarding their experience of the toilets. If they want to provide comment or rating, they have to go back to Homepage to redo the searching process. As a result, users would be discouraged from giving comments because of these complicated steps.
By making comment and report function more accessible , it will increase the total number of rating and comment.
According to the interview results, I created personas representing 2 target groups of people, Lora (hiking beginner, 28) and Nancy (hiking lover, 45) to better understand their needs and prioritize goals.
Based on the findings from the research and building empathy phase, I created the sitemap of Poop Guide app . There would be 4 main tabs on the homepage interface, which are Search, Edit, Record and Profile.
After finishing the work flow and sitemap, I visualised the app concept using wireframes. Before moving to the usability test, I made the clickable prototype by adding map images and links using Figma.
I had done the usability test 2 times. The first time was checking whether the main workflow was reasonable or not. I simply observed user’s interaction with the app without giving any direction. For the second time, my goal was to finalise the app. Thus, I made the list of actionable tasks to see if the app could be fully functioned.
Here’s some changes that I made after the usability tests.
To make search more convenient for hikers, the option of searching by country park was provided. I used a dropdown list to group the country parks by region instead of buttons. This could fasten the process with less clicks and make the interface cleaner. However, the user was a bit confused as he thought he had to click all 3 dropdowns. Thus, I changed to a tab bar with more emphasis on the selected region .
The user did not aware the location icon as it was not standing out from the map background. I changed to a larger chat box sign with white background as the location icon to create contrast from the map. Also, rating of the toilet was put on the icon so that user could compare for the rating easily.
I tended to provide both filter and sort function for better searching result. However, the user mentioned that he rarely sorted the result. He would definitely choose the nearest toilet when he was in urgent need. It would be pointless to provide sort functions like distance and rating. To make things simpler, I removed the sort function and ranked the result using distance by default.
Apart from keyword search and current location search, we provide 2 advanced search methods in Poop Guide, allowing users to find toilets according to country parks and hiking routes
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Let’s click the phone to try out these 2 special features 👉
Users would receive the notification message when they almost reach the toilet if they turn on the notification function. This could prevent missing any toilets along the trail.
Users could save their favourite toilets and hiking routes for future reference. Those records could be found under the “Record” tab.
I did get stuck for a long time at the early stage of designing the toilet finding app. It was because I wanted everything to be perfect in the beginning so that I did not need to make changes afterwards. As a result, I put too much focus on having advanced functions, layouts and fancy designs during wireframing. And this took me 2 weeks to finish the wireframe. Yet, a lot of changes had to be made when moving to the prototyping stage in order to enhance user experience. Instead of focusing every single matter at the early stage, I learnt to focus on big picture first so as to test for the feasibility and user-friendliness of the idea. Then we could focus on improving small parts during the final stage of revision.
To make the app more user-friendly, I tended to include many filter and sort options for better searching results. However, users were confused by the complicated options which increased the searching time. This was against the goal of making search easier. The more did not necessarily imply the better. Less is more. Think from user’s perspective to decide whether the option is worth to keep or not.
