Hiking Buddies design project.
It’s been a while since I wanted to write about my side hustle, which keeps me busy and satisfies my craving for design craft on and off the last 5 years.
The story of Hiking Buddies started in Munich, Germany, where one restless hiker created a Facebook community to unite mountain-goers from the area. Later it spread to Switzerland and some other mountainy hot spots. With time Facebook could not accommodate the growing number of hiking events: people could sign in and not show up, there was no rating system to prevent beginner hikers from joining advanced mountaineering ventures. So one day a couple of very skilled and bored software engineers had enough of it and built a website, that kept in order hiking routes and events. https://www.hiking-buddies.com/ became an instant hit in the Munich hiking community. But truth be told, it might be a masterpiece of software engineering, but it is not a masterpiece of UX. My professionally trained designer’s eye was not happy (still not, but we are getting there). I decided to help a bit, and here my part of the story begins.
And one more remark before we get started: Hiking Buddies is a non-commercial organisation, meaning, nobody is making money out of it, for better or worse. It also means that somebody spends significant private funds to pay the servers' costs and some other expenses.
I apologise upfront for my sloppy writing style. As it’s a hobby project, I did not employ chatGPT to help with writing, so I kept my native accent and grammatical mistakes :-).
And I’ll start with my personal story. I moved to Munich 5 years ago. It was my 5th country after Russia, France, Spain and the Netherlands. Having some experience reestablishing myself in new locations, I already had a solid process for finding new friends and activities. The first week in Munich, I joined all expat and hiking groups on Facebook and Meetup, that I could find (5 years ago Facebook and Meetup were still hot). And Hiking Buddies was among them. Finding friends was never so easy! Before Munich, most expat meetings meant sitting in a bar and drinking beer. I like neither bars nor beer. In Munich it was different. Instead of bars, I went to beautiful places high in the mountains, struggling through snow, sweating, trying to keep up with the “Mountain goats” and adventurous souls, and having great fun with great people. I loved it. That is how I became a loyal member of the Hiking Buddies community. That’s why I volunteered to help.
Besides a dozen Facebook groups, Hiking Buddies is a website and mobile app for iPhone and Android. We started working on the website redesign 5 years ago, but it got stuck after we could not find a decent React developer to build my designs (somehow, not many people want to code for free, do you know any? Send them to us!). We finished one page with the list of events, but that was the end. I’ll attach the designs, but for now, I focus on a more sexy mobile app. In this post, I will use the freshest mocks and prototypes, that might be not fully developed yet (or developed in a slightly different way). To see the current state, download the app from the App Store or Google Play.
Mountain sports is the core theme of Hiking Buddies, but the main differentiator from other hiking apps — the focus on the community. People and events are at the heart of Hiking Buddies. It doesn’t dare to compete with Stravas and Komoots of the world, which are nailing the maps and tracking. That’s why the home screen focuses on the user's upcoming and recent activities, as well as uploading and recent activities in the community.
The Events list is by far the most used part of the app. Imagine the situation: it’s Wednesday, the weather forecast looks promising, you have no plans yet, you want to go somewhere new and with fun people. And one more thing, you have a desk job and you need to move, otherwise that bottom part of your body will get indecently large. So you open Hiking Buddies and see a bunch of hikes already planned. The first one is a hike around a lake where you’ve already been 5 times, with 25 participants, great for socialising, but you need a bit more of a challenge. The second is conquering the highest peak of the region, and it starts at 4 am, plus those dudes in the group — they are hiking machines, you’ll never keep up. The next one is a trail run, it sounds great, but you are not yet in the right shape for 36 km running through the Alps. Then there’s a Hike+Sauna event, a German-style-textile-free sauna with a bunch of very fit strangers… Well, you are not that integrated yet. Finally, you find that perfect hike, not too hard, not too easy, with a reliable organiser and a fun group, so you join in. This is how the Events list is used. We started adding new activity types (cycling, climbing, social events etc), and hopefully filtering will become more advanced soon.
From there you can open each event and see details: route specs (technical difficulty, elevation gain, duration, etc), map and profile, and instructions for the hike.
We’ve been thinking about transport options. Because the hiking community originates in Munich, it used to make sense for everyone to meet at the main train station and travel to the hiking spot together. Another option was a carpool, where drivers could add their cars and others could join as passengers. But with hiking geography growing, this simple approach did not work so well. For example, in Switzerland, people are more distributed and the transportation network is more advanced, so it doesn’t make sense to travel all together, some would come by train, some by car, and others might even take a bike. For this, we had to think of more flexible transportation options for our app. On the other hand, for other groups commuting all together is part of the hiking experience, so it’s up to the organiser to decide if they want to allow mixed transport options or travel all together all the way.
The Routes list contains a large database of routes with their technical ranking and automatically adds public transport info, destination and parking for drivers, and even information about mountain huts.
The hiker profile page contains the hiking history of the person, reviews and, the killer feature — points that translate into hiker level (Beginner, embarrassing Advanced Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced and, the Mountain Goat). Don’t underestimate what people do to gain points and the Mountain Goat status!
Reviews are also important for creating reputation and credibility. Some organisers would not want to accept people with little proven hiking experience for difficult mountaineering adventures. For others, fitness and speed matters. And last, when people sign up and don’t come to the hikes, wasting someone else’s opportunity to join — they get a shameful No-show note in their profile.
Hiking Buddies is run fully by volunteers and doesn’t generate any cash (for better or worse). Nonetheless, the expenses are growing and soon it will become too expensive of a hobby. There is a PayPal Donate button on the app and the website, but not many people use it. We needed to think about a more sustainable crowdfunding approach. And that brought me to the idea of a Sustainer badge — people would receive a badge after signing up for one of 3 subscriptions. We have yet to see how this idea would fly.
That’s it about Hiking Buddies for now. In the meantime, I am ready to end my professional pause and look for the real job: if you know of any open roles of Product Design Heads, UX Managers, or UX Designers (Senior and up) — let me know! Find me at https://annaarteeva.com/ or https://www.linkedin.com/in/annaarteeva/
Also, you can follow my adventures on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/anna__arteeva/ . It’s entirely personal, I’m not a blogger and never advertise anything.
