AI-supported Tool for Product and Customer Research

This project explores the opportunities and tensions of digital technologies in the sustainable trail and camping infrastructure management in different ways:

(1) identifying hikers' socio-cognitive and behavioral aspects to understand how digital technologies mediate psychological and social experiences in protected areas;

(2) determining rate usage, way of using, and purpose of using digital technologies among different stakeholders (administrative team and hikers).

The ultimate goal of this project is to design and develop a prototype app-based trail information collection and infrastructure messaging system to promote low-impact behaviors and provide sustainable trails.

Background and Goals

We have some key goals in order to guide our user-centered research.

Generative Research Goals:

Understand if and for what reasons hikers use digital technologies in different hiking stages (pre-hike, on-hike, post-hike).
Understand the level of awareness of "Leave No Trace" principles among hikers through interviewing and social media analysis of Reddit, Instagram, and Trail Journals.
Exploring what kinds of information, resources, and tools hikers find useful during a hike; And, How they characterize experiences with digital tools and technologies, including their motivations, attitudes, and challenges.
Understand the points of tension and overlap between managers and agency staff, volunteers, and hikers in terms of their socio-technological worlds — values, beliefs, and practices, and the broader organizational conditions.

Process

To accomplish the project's goals, our team, a group of interdisciplinary faculty and students at Virginia Tech from computer science, recreation ecology, social science, and urban planning, leveraged a mixed-methods approach to understand users' perspectives and practices.

Social Media Analysis

I collected data from different online platforms (e.g., Reddit, Instagram, and Trail Journals) about the Triple Crown of hiking, three major U.S. long-distance hiking trails: the Appalachian Trail (AT), the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), and the Continental Divide Trail (CDT) in the last five years.

Our team then analyzed data using machine learning techniques (e.g., topic modeling, sentiment analysis, motif analysis, etc.) and qualitative coding. We used social media analysis to study hikers' perspectives, practices, behaviors, expectations, and discussions around "Leave no Trace" principles.

Interviews with various stakeholders

We conducted interviews with key people from different roles who care about preserving the AT and are enthusiastic about experiencing the wilderness, including the administrative and management team (e.g., resource managers, trail maintainers, volunteer clubs, etc.) and hikers.
We asked the management team about their knowledge of AT hikers, the challenges they face in sustainable management on the AT, and the opportunities/tensions digital technologies provide for this matter and for communicating with hikers. We also spoke with hikers about their desired experiences, practices, and values on the trail. These interviews added insightful knowledge to us.

Co-creative workshop

It was important for our team to bring hikers and trail management staff into the design and research process. We held a 2-hour workshop at the 2022 ALDHA gathering with roughly 17 participants to gather further input and get others involved in imagining and creating potential solutions to some of the key problems we were learning about.

The workshop was divided into three activities:
(1) Empathy Map - We wanted to collect data about stakeholders' views on using mobile applications on the trail.
(2) Story Boards - We aimed to gather input about users' behaviors and practices in different situations (e.g., reporting an issue on the trail, joining social experiences, communicating with club members, etc.).
(3) Collaborative App Design - We leveraged scenario mapping to gather users' views about their concerns, goals, and barriers when they want to use an app to meet the goals in those specific scenarios.

Prototyping

Armed with our learnings from social media analysis, interviews, and holding a workshop, I leveraged Figma, the collaborative design tool, to create a medium-fidelity prototype app-based to deal with stakeholders' issues and challenges and provide a better experience for various stakeholders.

Key features of the app design include:

Reporting on issues (e.g., bear activities, left trash, wildfire, etc.) hikers face on the trail. Hikers can determine the type and importance of the issue as well as set the time, date, and location while explaining the problem via text/image and sending it publicly or privately to the assigned staff who take care of that region.
Delivering the communication platform between hikers and club members, volunteers, and trail maintainers who are knowledgeable about the trail and can give correct information about the trail. This messaging system is not for chatting with other hikers but for providing accurate information to them when they need help.
Providing educational information about "Leave No Trace" principles to hikers.
Adding a review system to shout out appreciation for good service or maintaining a location.
Having a community participation score and gamification reward system to incentivize the community to participate and add value to the community.

"It should be noted that this project is under development and will cover other aspects in the near future. Currently, I am working on it as part of my Ph.D. Dissertation."

Crucuial Insights

Our findings from social media analysis revealed that hikers use various social media and online platforms for different reasons. For instance, Reddit is an information-sharing platform, Instagram is a social experience-sharing media, and the Trailjournal website is an online journaling platform for Thru-hikers.

Based on interviews, we found out that overcrowding in the protected areas, a lack of proper communication and messaging system between hikers and the administrative team, a lack of sufficient information about users' values and practices on the trail, archaic data collecting methods, etc. are the main challenges of the sustainable management team.

Insights from the workshop also helped us understand hikers value app-based solutions as a tool to help them meet their goals and needs for a wilderness experience, not as a social messaging system to disturb them on the trail.

For additional findings and learnings, please contact morva.saati@gmail.com.

Morva Saaty, Jaitun V. Patel, Norhan Abdelgawad, Jeffrey Marion, D. Scott McCrickard, Shalini Misra, and Kris Wernstedt. "Note: Studying Sustainable Practices of Appalachian Trail Community based on Reddit Topic Modelling Analysis." In ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies (COMPASS), pp. 560-563. 2022. (PDF)
Morva Saaty, Jaitun V. Patel, Derek Haqq, Timothy L. Stelter, and D. Scott McCrickard. "Integrating Social Media into the Design Process." arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.04315 (2022). (PDF)

Related Publications

Research Impact

Stakeholders in the outdoor domain, trail maintainers and managers, as well as researchers interested in outdoor recreations and sustainability, can leverage our findings to be aware of hikers' needs and experiences. These results will be used in developing a cyber-based information system that supports sustainable trail infrastructure services.

I have been involved in collecting data, social media analysis, designing interview questions, conducting interviews with the AT stakeholders, conducting a qualitative analysis of interviews, holding a workshop, prototyping the app-based design, and taking the lead in presenting and publishing research papers.

Contribution

Challenges and My Learnings

Working with large quantities of hiker-generated data caused complexities in the analysis, conclusion, and decision-making phases.
Incorporating the participation of stakeholders from several states on the AT created challenges to design the study.
Cross-functional collaboration with researchers and stakeholders in different areas in a brainstorming session and design thinking process helps a team work towards a common goal and solve our user needs with the best solutions by considering different perspectives.
We would absolutely say that numbers alone cannot speak for themselves in the UX world and that understanding why a user does something is vital. This represents the importance of mixed-methods (Qualitative and Quantitative methods) for analyzing big data to glean users' needs and concerns.

Research Team:

Morva Saaty, Jaitun Patel, Norhan Abdelgawad, Dr. Scott McCrickard, Dr. Shalini Misra, Dr. Kris Wernstedt, and Dr. Jeffrey Marion.

Fall 2021 - Ongoing