- iOS
- Android
- Augmented Reality
Our redesign of Grouse Mountain’s guest services app improves the overall user experience, including cutting edge augmented reality elements.
Project Summary
Increasing visitor engagement through augmented reality, summer-winter toggle, a ticket purchasing portal webcam feeds, event lists, snow reports, dining locations, Grouse Grinds tracking, and ‘what’s open’ reports for lifts, runs and terrain.
FreshWorks redesigned the Grouse Mountain mobile iOS and Android application, improving upon overall user experience and adding cutting edge augmented reality map elements. The brand new application features a summer-winter toggle, a ticket purchasing portal, webcam feeds, event lists, snow reports, dining locations, grouse grind tracking, and ‘what’s open’ reports for lifts, runs and terrain.
The new guest services app focuses on functionality and the team has added convenient capabilities for users, including: Purchasing tickets & passes, viewing the locations of the mountain’s attractions in augmented reality, multi-language support (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and Japanese), and a completely redesigned user experience.
The Grouse Mountain app is a convenient way to get the latest information on what’s happening at Grouse Mountain, to track your Grouse Grinds®, to purchase quick tickets and to navigate the mountaintop with the assistance of the Augmented Reality Map.
FreshWorks Studio delivered a high-quality and stable app, and they’re currently assisting with the QA process.”
Jodi Westbury
Marketing and Communications, Grouse Mountain
The Challenge
When Grouse Mountain first approached FreshWorks Studio, they were maintaining two separate mobile applications. One that was focused on activities on the mountain only, while the other’s main goal was the Grouse Grind® tracking. Not only did that require twice the effort spent on maintaining a mobile app, but it also divided the app’s user group or required a user to download multiple applications. Furthermore, the apps were only available on iOS, resulting in Grouse Mountain potentially losing out on over 2 billion monthly active Android devices (Google, 2017).
With over 1.3 million guests per year, Grouse Mountain is one of the top tourist destinations in Vancouver. Therefore, creating an app that supports multiple languages was essential to allow visitors to get the most out of their experience when visiting the mountain.
Another goal was to incorporate cutting edge technology, such as the augmented reality map, to stand out from other attractions in the area.
The Solution
The FreshWorks team submitted the proposal to Grouse Mountain, including some initial design thoughts from FreshWorks designer Karen in the spring of 2018.
Once accepted, FreshWorks started working with Grouse Mountain on combining the functionality of the two existing iOS applications and adding the new features while also creating the Android app.
Utilizing The Jibe’s API, the team was able to take advantage of the existing backend. Weekly calls with The Jibe ensured that continuous progress was made.
Once the beta version was completed, the FreshWorks team went to Grouse Mountain, championed the Grouse Grind®, and was able to see their hard work (especially on the augmented reality map) live in action.
Being able to go and see how many people are doing the Grind and other activities on the mountain brought us even closer to the project.
Project Manager
The Features
The app was built from scratch, combining the functionalities from the previous two apps and adding new capabilities. The user can now switch their language preference, purchase tickets and lift passes directly from their mobile device, and view locations of the attractions on the mountain using the augmented reality mobile app.
Technologies Used
The Grouse Mountain iOS app was built using Swift while the Android app uses Kotlin.
The Grouse Grind was originally a separate app which has now been integrated as a feature in the Grouse Mountain guest services app, making it more convenient for visitors.
This feature of the mobile application lets a user track their Grouse Grind times and view past attempts, keep track of PBs, and even collect badges for their number of Grind completions.
By signing up for an account, the user can also participate in the leaderboard community. The leaderboard can be filtered by gender and age to get a direct comparison of the user’s effort. Friends can be added by username, making it easy to compare personal best times.
One of the highlights of the app is the newly implemented augmented reality tour
once the user is on top of the mountain. It helps users navigate the mountaintop by pointing them in the direction of the World Famous Lumberjack Show, the Scenic Peak Chair, and various other mountaintop activities through the lens of AR.
If you’re interested in a more detailed look at the process of building the AR portion of the app, FreshWorks team member Skyler wrote a great blog article about the process on Medium. You can read it here.
What's Next?
With the rollout of the new iOS and Android application, Grouse Mountain already has plans for the next version of the mobile app. Currently, for example, ticket sales are limited to day passes. In the near future Grouse Mountain will allow users to purchase all types of tickets, including season passes, directly from their phone.
Grouse Mountain also plans to integrate a tracker for the Snowshoe Grind® and use 360° video to encourage users to have an even more interactive experience while visiting Grouse Mountain.
What the Client is Saying:
They not only wanted to deliver something that worked but something they’d be proud to share.
"FreshWorks Studio delivered a high-quality and stable app, and they’re currently assisting with the QA process. It’s been a seamless collaboration. The team offers valuable solutions to each challenge, completes tasks on schedule, and shows a strong commitment to the final product’s success."
Jodi Westbury
Director of Marketing and Communications, Grouse Mountain