Coast Redwoods Tab Interaction
This eLearning tab interaction provides hikers with information on coastal redwoods, focusing on interesting facts as they dive into new trails. Through interacting with each of the four color-coded tabs, learners can explore where redwoods grow, how climate is essential to their growth, the habitats they provide and why they’re the oldest living trees.
Audience: Hikers new to the coastal trails in Northern California and Oregon
Responsibilities: Visual & graphic design, eLearning development & instructional design
Tools Used: Adobe Illustrator & Articulate Storyline 360
The Problem & Solution
The beginning points of many trailheads on the Pacific coast don’t provide information on their biggest draw: redwoods. Starting a hike with working knowledge of how they’ve survived for so long and the habitats they provide will allow hikers to be aware of what to look out for as they move through a trail and further appreciate their majesty.
A tab interaction was a strong solution because it can easily provide information to the learner by focusing on the most salient information. Hikers can quickly scan a QR code at the start of a trail to access the learning experience as they start their journey. By breaking the information down into bullet points in each of the four categories, learners can quickly learn new facts and even refer back to once they are farther on the trail.
My Process
Being new to the Bay Area myself, redwoods have always mystified me when I’ve been on hikes. Understanding how redwoods survive the wildfires moving through their habitats was a question on my mind on each hike. I designed this eLearning experience in response to the questions I’ve had while hiking and wanted to create a solution to help other hikers who might not have working knowledge of redwoods.
I went through several iterations to land on the final design. Working through how to include an image of redwoods while also keeping the overall design clean and easy to read required experimenting with photos, illustrations, and paintings. A photo best captured the essence of redwoods as long as I could find the right opacity and shade of white to place on top of it. Illustrating the icons for the different categories was a task I was delighted to take in. My main focus was having each category’s icon be easily readable and quickly communicate what they were representing. The final design for the tab interaction tackled the issues I came up against during the iterative process and I love how the magnificence of coast redwoods was captured.