The Dartmouth Outing Club has been taking students and other members of the Dartmouth Community on outdoor adventures for more than 100 years. As the oldest outing club in the country, the DOC has a rich history, but its process for organizing trips and tracking participation, equipment rental and training was decidedly outdated.
“It was clunky to use, requiring a number of extra steps for leaders, support, admin staff and participants,” says Rory Gawler, ’05, advisor to the DOC at the Outdoor Programs Office (OPO).
Trip leaders post descriptions for anyone to browse and easily sign up for, increasing DOC accessibility
When students began getting frustrated with the booking system — done entirely by hand, often on paper — the leadership at DOC knew that it was time to bring the process into the twenty-first century. The DOC leadership, including then Vice President Lauren Mendelsohn, ’19, began looking into options for software that could streamline DOC processes.
“After talking to some other web developers, we decided that DALI would be our best option, since they know and cater to the Dartmouth community,” Mendelsohn says.
The DOC was awarded support from DALI Lab to design a customized software product that would make running excursions easier, safer and more accessible. After a year and a half in development, the system, called Trailhead, launched this fall. That was just in time to provide students a safe way to access the outdoors even during the pandemic.
“We wouldn't have been able to operate as smoothly as we did this fall without Trailhead,” Gawler says.
Building the system was challenging for the engineers at DALI, because the platform needed to be able to serve many sets of users: students and participants needed to be able to sign up for trips seamlessly; DOC leadership needed to be able to track who was on a trip and what equipment they were using; and OPO leaders needed to be able to approve everything and see the necessary qualifications for trip leaders.
The mobile-friendly site enables Trip Leaders to easily register participants, report incidents, and check back in upon return.
“The biggest challenge was creating interfaces for student leaders, tripees, and OPO staff that all went together and met all the various needs,” Mendelsohn says.
Erica Lobel, program manager at DALI Lab, agreed.
“There’s a pretty complex role structure of who’s allowed to do what,” at DOC, she says.
Because of that, the first step of the project was for DALI designers to understand the different people involved in each DOC trip, and to identify key functions that the platform needed to have. Because the DOC has such a long history, and a booking system that had been used for about forty years, changes would mean disrupting familiar systems for long-time users. Designers were conscious of this as they created the user experience.
“The complexity of moving a system into a digital version is not just copy paste,” Lobel says. “There are so many better ways to do things, but it requires flexibility and imagination.”
Formerly managed on a whiteboard in the DOC office, an online calendar now manages vehicle reservations.
The project also had to work with leadership teams in flux. DOC is student lead, and so leaders like Mendelsohn graduated and moved on mid-project. In addition, the OPO underwent a leadership change during the project as well, and students at DALI also graduated. At one point, Gawler says, it felt like few people had a deep understanding of the project.
However, Ziray Hao, ’23, current lead software engineer for Trailhead, was persistent. Amid all the changes, he kept his focus on the main goal of the project: “building a beautiful, easy-to-use, and delightful platform that can inspire students to get outside,” he says.
When Trailhead launched this fall, it was everything that Hao wanted — even if he occasionally needed to be on-call to help address bugs in the system. The system became even more important this year, because it allows DOC to track participants and equipment, doing contact tracing if that ever becomes necessary.
Trailhead helps DOC trips happen — like this one to Moosilauke in February. PC: DOC
Building Trailhead gave Hao and the rest of the DALI team real-world professional experience, he says.
“I learned how to architect a platform that can scale to hundreds of users and how to engineer a digital experience that is inviting,” he says.
Normally, engineers at the DALI Lab can rollout their product in phases before the full launch, but Trailhead had to be ready for full use as soon as it was live. Tim Tregubov, director and co-founder of DALI Lab, says the project provided a unique challenge to the students who worked on the Trailhead.
“That’s a great student experience and it’s lovely that we could provide it,” he says.
When Hao saw that DOC hosted more than 200 excursions this fall — all safely — he was thrilled.
For Gawler, who is responsible for making sure that the DOC functions safely, Trailhead makes a day at work a bit easier.
“It's been a dream for a long time and we're really glad to have it live,” he says.
Written by Kelly Burch