Helping travellers plan their next Yukon adventure

The Government of Yukon came to us with the need to refresh their Yukon Road Trip app. The app is designed to help users plan their next journey along Yukon’s major highways. It allows users to find roadside sites, whether they're looking to learn more about Yukon’s history and culture, view wildlife, camp or visit a recreation site. The app includes more than 200 Government of Yukon locations, run by historic sites, the Wildlife Viewing Program and Yukon Parks.

The focus of our collaboration was to revamp the app to make it beautiful, cohesive, and much more intuitive. The refreshed app creates excitement that users should feel when viewing these captivating locations. Travellers can download the app for free from Google Play or the Apple Store.

The high-level goals for the app refresh and rebuild were to:

• Capture a spirit of intrigue that every roadtrip site encapsulates
• Help Government of Yukon expand its visitor base, reach new demographics and increase visitor numbers 
• More deeply engage those visiting on site, encouraging them to explore the campgrounds in unexpected ways and exposing them to a rich corpus of natural resources
• Extend Government of Yukon’s reach beyond the physical grounds of the camp itself, allowing users to access the unique options that are the hallmark of this app
• Make the app available to a wider audience
• Bring the app inline with best practices to enable the Yukon Government to extend the functionality more easily in the future
  
   

In three months, our team created a modern app design for Yukon, which is featured on Google Play and the Apple store. Our work included refreshing the design (UI/UX) and build that is user-friendly, modern, visually engaging and easy to navigate.
 

Our work included: 

• Optimizing app performance, while balancing the need for showcasing hundreds of images
• Simplifying brand elements to better align with the colourful spirit the Yukon brand embodies
• Integrating Mapbox with the underlying React Native technology to show a list of camping sites
• Calculating and caching the nearby sites on the server side, within a 50km radius using the Mapbox Directions API
• Providing intuitive popup modals to allow users to explore details of any given camping site in a popup modal
• Leveraging underlying data provided by a custom API to populate the app
• Creation of subtle animations to match the interactive user experience
• Development of a custom solution to create new endpoints, exposing data in an optimized structure
• Implementing a solid architecture to extend and add more features in future updates
• Compatibility with a wider range of devices and screen resolutions
• Modernization of the information architecture and navigation
• Adding visually rich filters to sort by highway, region or type of location
• Improvement to security settings for a seamless communication flow
• Providing a fully bilingual interface and accessible content following WCAG AA standards, to better serve all Canadians