In the last decade, there's been a sea change in camping culture. Car camping, sometimes called “Overlanding”, has exploded with innovations like rooftop tents as well as social trends like #vanlife or diy truck bed mods. Young adventurers are using their weekly commuter cars/trucks/vans as their recreation vehicles on the weekends.
I wanted to get a feel for the landscape so I combed through the App store and reviewed other camping apps. While there are a few apps for finding & reviewing campsites their features are overly ambitious and they often overlook overlanders. I wanted to start small and simple by focusing on the overlander as my target audience.
I knew an Overlander's typical prerequisites for choosing a campsite were safety, legality, and cost, but I wanted to dig deeper. I interviewed some overlander friends to get a wider view of their ideal campsite.
From the data I collected, I had a general idea of my filter parameters. I created a journey map and imagined a plausible user flow.
A few people suggested adding a feature for stringing multiple campsites together for planning road trips. I loved this idea and it became one of the core features of Overlandr. "Plan A Route" allows you to set a starting point and destination, then choose campsites along the way. I started with a basic sitemap followed by the some wireframing.
I wanted to keep the user-flow simple and intuitive by breaking the app into two main branches; Search Sites" and "Plan A Route". I drew a lot of inspiration from tried and true map apps like Google Maps and Zillow.
