OnTheSnow

Redesigning how skiers and snowboarders decided where to play while on the go.

Mobile App Design

Duration: February - March 2020

Role: UX Researcher, Content Strategist, Designer

OnTheSnow is a mobile app that allows skiers and riders to track current and historic snow conditions, and other resort data. We spent four weeks redesigning the OnTheSnow app experience for Vail Resorts.

The Problem

Unhappy skiers & riders

OnTheSnow was the most downloaded Apple App Store for ski/snowboard conditions in the winter of 2019/2020. The release of a UI update (by Vail) to the app in October 2019 effectively alienated users, resulting at the time of this project an averaging app rating of 2.6 stars.

OnTheSnow platforms include a plethora of content from snow reports and weather forecasts to live resort webcams and powder alerts.The TheOnSnow team challenged our cohort to investigate the cause of the users' unhappiness, and to propose solutions to their problem.

Our Solution

Scalability and Hierarchy

Basically a complete redesign of the app.

Our research and prototyping process led us to design an application with a simplified information hierarchy, increased customization, and added onboarding.

Our Process

4 week design sprint

Working with Vail Resorts schedule and being mindful of providing useful feedback we structured our four week design sprint into two sections. The first two weeks, small teams diverged in to research, and developed initial insights and prototypes. After a client presentation the teams regrouped in order to converge insights from the initial teams and develop a final prototype. This resulted into two app prototype recommendations the Vail team used in the final app update.

I served my team(s) as a UX researcher and UX designer.

Defining the Problem Statement

How might we help skiers and riders customize and organize the rich data OnTheSnow has in a compelling way?

Research & Testing

How do skiers and riders decide where to go

Current App Analysis

To start we dowloaded the OTS app to our own devices and took it for a spin. What we found was a generic feeling app with a hard to navigate user interface.

*Our team had both Android and iOS phones but we focused on iOS.

Analytics

The weekend warrior

Data Analytics

By analyzing data from OTS’s Google Analytics information and pairing it with user interviews, we concluded that the majority of OTS users were “weekend warriors”.

This heat map from mid February 2020 shows that most use occurs on weekend mornings, and some on Thursday/Friday’s. Presumably users are trying to decide if/where they want to go ski/ride the morning of, and some are making plans just a day or two in advance.

This map shows users based on location from December 2019 to February 2020. The User groups are clustered in big cities, mainly Denver, New York, Dallas, and Los Angeles, further showing how on the snow is popular amongst people who live in the city and plan their ski vacations in advance.

Competitive Analysis

My team and I analyzed several other ski industry apps, like Open Snow (direct competition), and the Epic and Ikon pass apps, as well as other more functionality outdoor related apps like MTP Project, Mountain Project, and All Trails.

User Interviews & Task Analysis

My team and I interviewed skiers and snowboarders who used OTS or similar apps to plan trips. We also performed a task analysis with each interviewee where they were asked to locate the snow report for their favorite resort.

Overall, the consensus from our users was that the app…

not easy to use
lacked consistency in UI elements
had valuable data but it was hard to find

Card Sorting & Ranking

Interviewees were also taken through a card sort to help us reprioritize the information hierarchy of OTS. My team and I found that user reports, current weather, 24-hour weather forecast, and recent snowfall data were consistently ranked high on the list of importance.

Key Insights

What skiers & riders want

Scannable / Hierarchy
On the Snow is full of information, but on the go users need to be able to easily scan the app to locate the information most relevant to them.
Customization
Each user has different favorite mountains, ideal snow conditions, and abilities levels, and more. For this app to truly be useful to the user, customization of some key features is necessary.
Easy onboarding
A few recommendations about how to maximize the app will allow users to get the most satisfaction out of the experience.

Design

Redesigning OnTheSnow

Mid Fidelity Design

Mid Fidelity Design Clickable Prototype

My team added an easier searching flow so new users can quickly get the most out of the app. We also simplified navigation and the overall UI and prioritized real-time data.

For the resort pages, we paired down the navigation into four categories. This makes it easier for users to switch between them quickly using the breadcrumbs.

Final Design

The final design built off of the mid fidelity design but further prioritized onboarding and customization. This design also includes a new feature that analyzes resort conditions and declares whether they are ideal for you based on your settings.

Clickable Prototype

Impact

Measuring snowfall success

Success Metrics

Success for this project will be determined by several factors, including: app downloads, ratings and reviews, page views, and engagement, which consists mostly of user reports.

Financial Impact

OnTheSnow's revenue is ad driven, increased views and engagement on the mobile app will increase company revenue. A successful app redesign has the potential to do this. Over 60% of users view the OnTheSnow website from mobile, and if the mobile app were better all of those users could potentially switch from viewing the responsive site to viewing the mobile app.

Outcome

A Ski Season melted

We presented our app re-designs and our insights to the representatives from Vail Resorts in early March of 2020. They had developers at the ready to begin to implement some of our feedback and test the app with users during the remainder of the ski season. Unfortunately, within two weeks of our final presentation the ski industry closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.