web app for kids to track their outdoor adventures and win prizes
Kids in Parks — a program of the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation — encourages youth to be active in public parks through adventures on hiking/nature trails and disc golf courses. They use prizes to motivate kids to track their adventures on the website, thereby collecting impact data that can be reported to funding organizations.
Alloy’s build of Kids in Parks’ new website focused on incorporating a new and improved tracking interface, as well as making participant registration easy. The new site complements the organization’s strong social media use, and moves the organization toward an inbound marketing strategy that takes advantage of the rich content they have already been creating on social media platforms.
One goal was to balance marketing the program to parents and children with getting users to track their adventures (primarily trail hikes). It’s evident on the homepage that the immediate priority is for users to sign up — for both data and funding purposes from the client’s perspective. The interface also needed to make it easy for users to find and track trails.
The visual design succeeds in representing our strategic priorities by establishing a diverse visual library/language of photography, iconography, and typography. This system allows us to establish clear hierarchy and visual balance.
Another significant design consideration was creating a site that appeals to both children and adults at the same time. The approach to solve this was a mix of illustration and real objects that gives an overall fun, youthful impression, and earthy, grounded colors with splashes of brighter hues such as orange and spring green.
The goal for the tracking interface was for users to finish the process and not abandon it midstream. For that reason we simplified and streamlined, taking a highly visual, touch-friendly approach — making the tracking process less burdensome, boring, long, and discouraging. We also made a more game-like dashboard to encourage long-term use.