This week, I decided on the community I want to design for. I chose hikers because it aligns with my own experience and gives me a clear understanding of user needs. I have seen that many people enjoy hiking but often lack companions, especially when they are new or unsure about going alone.
From this, I defined the core problem. People can find trails easily, but they struggle to connect with others to hike together. Existing platforms focus heavily on trail discovery, but they do not support community interaction in a simple and direct way.
Based on this, I shaped my initial idea. The platform will allow users to explore trails and then take action by either joining a community hike or creating one. This connects discovery with participation, which I see as the main value of the application.
I considered multiple directions before settling on this. One option was to build a trail recommendation system with filters and ratings. Another option was to create a social platform focused only on posts and discussions. I decided not to pursue these because they either focus too much on data or too much on social interaction without linking both effectively.
I chose to combine both elements in a focused way. Users should move from browsing a trail to organising or joining a hike with minimal steps. This led me to define my core feature as a simple flow: explore a trail, select it, and create or join a community hike.
At this stage, I also identified constraints. My current technical skills limit how complex the system can be. Features like real time chat, advanced filtering or map integrations would increase complexity and risk. Because of this, I will prioritise a smaller set of features that still demonstrate the main purpose of the platform.
The essential functionality I will focus on includes:
displaying a list of trails viewing details of a selected trail creating a community hike post linked to that trail displaying created posts for others to see
Optional features such as comments, likes and user profiles will be excluded for now. This decision allows me to focus on building one complete and functional user flow rather than multiple incomplete features. In the next stage, I will explore how this feature can be structured in terms of pages, data and user interaction through building the wireframes.