Nature Enthusiast App
Document flora & fauna
from your travels
When my friend introduced me to his grandfather, I learned about his avid interest in bird-watching. His grandfather was a police officer and security guard for 30+ years. When he was on duty, he’d often look out the window and keep track of what he saw to pass the time (when there were no security threats). Public spaces had a lot of wildlife back then, so he saw a variety of birds perched next to the window.
Since he retired, he often spends his time watching birds visit his bird feeder and bird bath, observing and taking note of all of the species he’s seen. As his grandfather is from the UK, he often saw birds like starlings, wrens, and European greenfinches. Sometimes, he’d even spot Canada geese during the autumn and winter months. Though he would often use bird spotters’ guides to tick off the species of birds he’s seen, he wishes there was a better way to catalogue all of his findings. Taking inspiration from his story, I began sketching out a few ideas I had in mind…
Ideation
While my friend’s grandfather preferred watching birds over other types of flora and fauna, I wanted to create a platform that all avid nature enthusiasts can use to learn and share their findings with. I wanted to include not just birds, but various other animals, flowers, trees, and more. While checking off species from a bird spotters’ guide is a satisfying personal achievement, I wanted to include the option to properly document these enthusiasts’ findings so nature enthusiasts, and especially bird watchers, can showcase the findings they’re most proud of to their friends and family. I decided on creating an app as it’d be an easily portable option if people wish to document their findings from their travels.
The Market
After exploring the market, I found that there is a notable scarcity of options for plant, animal, or insect identification in the App Store. Furthermore, the available apps primarily cater to distinct needs, with a focus on things like plant care or the identification of insect bites. This leaves a significant gap for passionate nature enthusiasts who aspire to document and build a comprehensive scrapbook cataloging the myriad of flora and fauna they encounter.
Seek by iNaturalist
User Personas
Here, the outcomes and achievements of the project are highlighted, including user feedback, adoption rates, and industry recognition.
Wireframing
With my friend’s grandfather’s story and my market research in mind, I started off with sketching some medium-fidelity wireframes. I created an introductory screen, a camera page to scan flora and fauna, a discovery page, an information page, a scrapbook theme selection page, a scrapbook customization page, and a settings page.
In the one of the scrapbook pages, I included a “zoomed out” version of the scrapbook. Though I felt like it would give users a better idea of what their scrapbook looked like as a whole initially, I later felt that it wasn’t so useful. It would be too small to be viewed on a phone, but might be more feasible for bigger devices like tablets and computers so I decided to remove this page. I also removed the settings page design as I felt there wasn't much need to display one as they usually don't differ much in design. In addition, I added some onboarding pages to give a better idea of what it would look like for a new user and smoothed out the design of the navigation bar.
Creating the Brand Image
For the main colours, I used several shades of green to signify the colours of nature. However, in the onboarding screens, I used a close complementary colour of deep purple to contrast the green and bring attention to the story told by the character within the screens. While it's not an exact complementary colour, I felt this deep purple was a better choice to add the ideas of depth and sophistication to the app's branding.
As for typography, I used Inter for the main font as it’s great for accessibility and comfortable for most users. However, for the ‘Get Started’ and onboarding screens, I chose Caveat, a sans-serif font, to give the feeling of whimsicalness in the design.
The Final Result
Prototyped version and more to come…
To showcase my improvement from previous designs, this is the previous design of my case study. The current final results are a new iteration.
