appalachian ski mountain
kiosk & reservation system

collaborator(s): ALLY CIZOWSKI

Appalachian Ski Mountain is a skiing and snowboarding resort in Blowing Rock, NC, known for its proximity to Appalachian State University and its popular kids programs. Before I began working at Overmountain Studios, a new kiosk and online reservation system for AppSki was in the works. Ally Cizowski, my predecessor, had begun plotting out the flow of the two systems, and had put enough hours into it that it wasn’t sensible to make as many changes as I would have liked.

ROUND 1

So, I evaluated what had already been created, and began filling in gaps and rearranging things that needed work, while trying my best not to waste her efforts. I recreated her screens in Adobe XD to make things a little easier to work with, and then tidied things up a bit. Very little of this was able to be changed at this point—the client felt comfortable and confident in what had been shown so far and didn’t want any sweeping changes.

From this point forward, I tried my best to influence things and redesign where I was allowed. There were many things not accounted for in any of these screens or flow diagrams that needed to be made or at least noted.

At this point, I needed to put together flow diagrams of some sort for both the kiosk and the online reservation system using Ally’s screens and anything I needed to make on my own to fill in the gaps she had left. All-in-all, I’d say the next images are 35% mine, 65% Ally’s.

After more and more rounds of feedback with the client and my supervisor, we had finally found the spot we needed to be. The mountain was going to open in less than two months, so development needed to get rolling. What we were left with at the end of round one was something nearing a 50/50 split in terms of man-hours between Ally and I.

Development began—I was not involved in front-end at this point in time—and the final product was satisfactory for the mountain’s opening.

ROUND 2 (IN-PROGRESS)

After the season ended, we knew that at least on the back end, a lot would need to change. I managed to convince my supervisor that if we were changing all of the back end, we might as well change all the front end too. So now I’m getting a chance to start from scratch, using only the foundation of what we created in 2019 as an opportunity to create something both functional and something that won’t get too much pushback from the client. Additionally, it was decided that the kiosk would be scrapped entirely thanks to new procedures put in place to prepare for whatever COVID-19 is doing in the 2020 season. This left only the online reservation system.

This time, I was able to begin with digital wireframes in Sketch as I would have preferred originally, using a wireframing kit. I quickly mocked up what we had—but much improved—and made the additions the client had requested.

After a few more rounds of feedback and many more surprise additions from the client, I was realizing that this was going to be equally as unwieldy as the original version. Even so, I’m at least excited that I’ve gotten to rebuild this using my own understanding of the project rather than hopping in once most everything had been done and picking up the pieces. We’re taking it slower this time since there’s many months before the mountain opens, to make sure that even at a stage this early, the client is totally happy—that way we won’t run into any massive roadblocks with them later on in the process.

Here’s where we are today, with still much more to go: