Crater Lake

Creating an app for Crater Lake visitors to utilize

I was tasked with creating a mobile app for a national park and I chose to do Crater Lake as the national park. Once I had chosen my national park, it was time
to research and find out what I wanted to do. I wanted to highlight three main things with this app. I wanted to have a map as the main page with clickable icons
that tell you what that is, I wanted to showcase the activities at Crater Lake and I wanted to allow people to reserve campgrounds and lodging.

Research
My first step with this project was researching what I wanted with the layout. This led me to checkout other apps and see how they set their layout. I noticed all
the the apps had a very similar feel and layout to one another. This helped me get an idea on how I wanted to layout my app.

After I had done this research on how I wanted the app to look, I now wanted to do my research on Crater Lake. What I wanted to do was research a map and
find the main things to highlight, find the activities that our best for the park and then search the nearby lodging and campsites to help people book their stay. I
was able to find the information I need on each thing and now wanted to work on creating it.

Sketching
Once I had my research done and information ready, it was time to work on the layout. I wanted to use my research mood board to figure out the best sketches
for my design.

My first sketch is the main home page. This page opens when you access the app and allows you to see a quick map of the park. I also wanted to sketch out my
icons which will highlight main parts of the park right on the main page. My next sketch is my activity page. I want this page to have activities broken up in to
three rows with two activities in each row. I wanted to have each activity clickable and have the details of the activity slide up. This makes it a smooth transition
from activity to activity. My last sketch was creating my camping and lodging page. What I wanted to do was have a similar look and feel to the activity page by
having two campsites and lodging sites that can be clicked on and allow the user to navigate easily.

Design
Once deciding on my sketches, it was time to start the design process. My design process went pretty smooth. My goal was to follow my sketches and build off
of them to keep the look that I had sketched out. As you can see, I was able to really work through my sketches and follow them as I was designing the app.

Prototype
https://www.figma.com/proto/jrdwxlbHD4wMFLonVAHS0J/Crater-Lake?page-id=0%3A1&type=design&node-
id=15-51&viewport=675%2C70%2C0.12&scaling=scale-down&starting-point-node-id=15%3A51

Final
When starting this project, I went into it very curious on how I wanted to approach it. I was able to see the value in many different things from doing this project.
One of the main ones was managing time. For each week, I started to create a different objective that I wanted to accomplish. Learning this helped me grow as
a designer. I felt like I was able to learn about what I wanted to do, and go out and do it within a timeframe that I had created for myself. I really felt myself
becoming more and more useful as a designer. I found the value in many things but another one was learning how to use research in different ways. Whether it
was for what to do or what not to do, on what idea i like or what idea gives this app the best look. I really was able to sit down and grow in so many different
areas that a designer uses. Looking back on this project, I felt I had created something that I was proud of and did what I wanted to do.