Launching new digital tools for hikers
Creating a start-up, 2018 - 20
WHERE EVERYTHING STARTED
As a passionate mountain lover, I’ve often experienced challenges in planning my hikes. Finding a new excursion, booking huts, understanding the duration and difficulty of a hike are not easy tasks as expected. Often the process is time-consuming and leaves some open questions. So how can digital services improve the process?
OUTCOME
Starting from my hiking and hut manager experience, I've decided to set up a team of experts (developer, business designer, designer) to address the challenges and launch IBEX, a family of services and products ideated for hiking enthusiasts. The digital services, available on the web and through all mobile platforms, aimed to provide relevant information to hikers to easily find and access
new mountain excursions that fit their needs around their location.
IBEX extended the outdoor experience by allowing hikers to collect memories and pictures via the hiking diary app, “check-in” on the hikes they have completed, follow the hiking community, and get inspired by other's adventures and pictures.
CHALLENGES ALONG THE PROJECT
“Planning hikes is time-consuming. How can we support the process?”
I started my creative process by researching, documenting and defining the key challenges I wanted to solve in the hiking domain.
After setting up a core team, we defined three main opportunity areas: hut booking service, personal hiking diary, and a hike finder with necessary information.
During interviews with experts and hut managers, the hut booking service emerged as a valuable and relevant option. But the complexity of the challenge suggested working on the other opportunity areas.
We decided to focus on a family of services to enhance the end-to-end hiking experience: get inspired, find a hike nearby, consult the relevant information, collect pictures, and document hikes.
“Collect and curate the hiking information is a huge effort. How can we make it sustainable for a small team?
While working on hike descriptions, we realised how important and challenging it is to provide complete and relevant information to describe the hikes and allow good planning. The challenge got even more complex due to the multi-language website and the limited availability for our small team to maintain curated content.
To address the problem, I developed a content generator that, thanks to AI algorithms, created hike descriptions in English, Italian and German, based on the hike characteristics stored in our database.
“There are different digital tools for hiking, but the experience is fragmented along the journey. How can we engage hikers with enjoyable and useful services?”
The market already offered many hiking services to plan and document hikes, but the hiker’s experience was often fragmented or complex.
We decided to start by providing a complete and simple hiking description and a system to find a hike near a selected location quickly. As a next step, we decided to develop the family of services to cover more touchpoints (mobile) and engage the hiker during the end-to-end experience. We developed a mobile diary app to capture and store pictures of the hikes, get inspired by the activity of the hiking community, challenge yourself by “checking in” on the completed hikes and keep track of your progress.
“Hikers like our products. How can we spread it to a wider group?”
The launch of the first services was well-received by our core user group. As a result, we decided to invest in different promotion strategies to reach a wide range of hikers across countries.
We presented our app and regularly shared hikes (IBEX website) in hiking groups on social platforms (Facebook). In addition, we invested in paid ads, produced curated content (SEO optimised), and collaborated with influencers and bloggers to use the cross-link potential.
As a result, we substantially increased the number of visitors (new and returning) and average engagement time on the web tool. Also, we increased the app download and number of active users.
NOTE: Despite the growing success of IBEX, we decided to discontinue the services after this promotion phase due to personal reasons of the team members.
MY ROLE
Strategic leadership
Initiating the entire project and setting up the core team.
Leading the entire strategic creation process from defining product launch.
Driving the design thinking process
Design leadership
Leading the entire design process for web and mobile service.
Overviewing and reviewing all the teamwork, from research and concepts, wireframes UI, prototyping, testing and documentation.
Marketing and promotion
Defining and leading the promotion campaign and other marketing initiatives.
Accounting and Budgeting
Managing the budgeting and team costs