September - December 2018
Final design and product flowchart
I thought of Bivy after a road trip out west, where I struggled to find free places to camp. I’m an aspiring designer and started this as a personal project to continue growing my design skills. This is my second design project and the first that included a variety of different features and user flows. I spent four months working through this project in my free time and received weekly guidance from a senior designer at my company.
It’s hard to find free campsites, especially when you’re already on the road.
There’s an incredible amount of shared knowledge among people who love to be outside, especially about great places to pitch a tent. Avid campers look for unique sites that are off the beaten path. Those who’ve been camping for years have a wealth of knowledge and advice, which they’re usually glad to share with other hikers, bikers, climbers, and campers.
As long as you love spending time outside, you’re in the club and privy to this campsite lore.
However, there are very few places where all of this shared information collects online. There are obscure forums and Bureau of Land Management maps, often posted on hard-to-find websites with poor user interfaces.
This makes it difficult to find desirable places to pitch a tent, especially if you’re out on the road and looking through these web pages on a mobile device. If you don’t know who to ask or the location is too remote to ask a local, those websites are your only option.
They’re hard to navigate, especially because they are not optimized for mobile. In order to save a site, the browser tab needs to be kept open and if you have poor reception it might not load back up. There is also no connection to a map application from these websites.
Original problem statement for Bivy
I’ve spent a lot of time driving around the country and living out of a tent. In 2016, I spent a month camping and hiking out west. It was my first extended trip and I experienced first-hand the difficulty of finding free campsites — in remote locations or populated ones. Longer camping trips require free sites unless you’re willing to pay $10 to $30 a night for 30+ nights to pitch your tent. Paid sites are often crowded as well and you aren’t guaranteed to get a spot.
I had enough difficulty looking for any place to stay, nevertheless a special one. The American West is littered with beautiful and remote sites, but there are so few places to find that information (and directions) that people traveling without a longtime expert or a local are often on their own.
After my initial hypothesis that there was a need for this kind of mobile app, I did some research to justify it. I also worked to better understand the users that this app would serve and the problems they face.
I determined four existing solutions for finding free campsites on long trips.
I found this application while searching for resources to use on my trips. It’s free to download and is populated with US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management data compiled by a software company.
Things that are nice about this app: