Hiking has exploded in popularity since the pandemic with more than 80 million Americans hiking in 2022 alone. There are many large mental and physical health benefits to hiking, however it can be daunting to select routes as a beginner. It is difficult to imagine how a route would feel before going on it, especially for those without past input.
In addition, many times hikers also don't take into account wildlife when choosing routes. Animals such as elks have also been shown to change behavior up to 1 mile away from hiking trails, and this has far reaching implications to the greater biosphere. With climate change being a threat to traditional migration paths, increased human activity can be detrimental to the already fragile patterns.
GREENTRaiL is an app that will give users personalized recommendations and help make hiking more eco-friendly.
Using biometric and environmental data, GREENTRaiL recommends users hiking trails based on average statistics of others who have completed the hike and synthesizes difficulty ratings. It will also use migratory and wildlife data to suggest less obtrusive hikes to local migratory patterns.
UI/UX prototyping was sketched first traditionally, and then brought into Procreate to develop final color and brand identity. High fidelity wire-framing was then done on Figma, and then the final UI/UX was refined using those prototypes.
GREENTRaiL was coded using Swift and integrates terraAPI to get wearable data and aggregate data of all the people who have taken the past trail.
All of us were new to Swift, and one of us fully couldn't run Xcode on their computer. Our UX/UI designer had also never designed for IOS before either, so there was a bit of a learning curve. Our coders ran into a lot difficulty integrating the terra API into the code, as well as general problems with front end and back end integration.
We learned how to develop using Swift, prototype for IOS on Figma and integrate terraAPI.
Future areas of development include syncing with other nature apps such as iNaturalist's API and AllTrails to give the user even more comprehensive data on wildlife and qualitative description.
