Tarkine Trails is a trail guide app for the wild North Western region of Tasmania, the Tarkine / tayana.
Meredith Range — Photo by Rob Blakers
Mount Edith Summit — Photo by Nicole Anderson
Problem: Condensing a printed trail guide, without rigid content structures, into a usable and extensible mobile application.
Tarkine Trails / takayna makuminya, a guide book published by the Bob Brown Foundation and now in second edition, is an extensive guide to Tasmania’s wild North West. The guide details hikes, bike and paddle trips, safety and practical information, facts about the Tarkine’s natural environment and wildlife, the long cultural heritage and history of the area, and local service providers.
The array of information formats in the guide book were an obvious challenge to convert — in both a content management (CMS) setting, and mobile app user experience.
Solution: A Flutter app using Material Design components, powered by a Silverstipe CMS and API feed.
I designed the initial prototype for this app over 5 years ago with the intention of using Ionic Framework to develop and publish it. When the project resumed years later, the version of Ionic used had become outdated and required a rebuild. I took the opportunity to redesign and redevelop the app using Material Design and Flutter.
Material Design was a convenient and efficient method of applying a design system to a relatively small project, and Flutter’s components perfectly suited the initial prototype. With 256 printed pages of content to include, we developed a Silverstripe CMS backend to handle the content management. We provide an API feed from Silverstripe to the app and have caching mechanisms to update content when the app is online.
Wireframed and prototyped using Protoshare, many years ago. It was pre-Material Design, and not something i’d use in this current epoch, but it did the job :)
Visual browsing
I initially prototyped, designed and developed the app with just 3 screens: Trails, an index of all trails with options to view by region, duration or grade; Favourites, a user shortlist including gestures; and Information for all the informational content not specific to trails.
High fidelity testing revealed some users were initially unaware they could touch through to view trail item screens—the most crucial content of the app.
With these insights I added a fourth screen, Explore for users to land on. The new screen includes image card scrollers for users to browse regions and curated lists visually, and familiarise themselves with the app screens before moving to the full index.
The explore screen also includes an announcement banner and prominent communication panel for the Bob Brown Foundation to reach users with important updates, news and appeals.
