Birder
Project At A Glance
The Ask:
For this two-week solo capstone with Flatiron School, I conducted research about beginning bird watchers to discover how a digital product might meet their needs.
From this research, I iterated upon amid-fidelity prototype to address the top pain points new birders face:
Needing guidance on how, when, and where to look for birds
Feeling overwhelmed and frustrated when trying to identify a bird
My Contributions:
UX Designer: domain analysis, competitive analysis, user interviews, synthesis, affinity diagram, empathy map, user persona, MoSCoW method for feature prioritization, and crafting a problem statement
UI Designer: mid-fidelity prototyping, task scenarios, user flow diagrams
Interaction Designer: microinteraction design, animation
Product Designer: presenting to stakeholders
The Discovery Phase
Getting To Know Today's Birder:
To start, I conducted research on current day bird watchers and trends. My domain analysis revealed important demographics on today’s birder:
Increased Digital Presence
With the rise of young birders has come an increase in demand for digital resources.
Understanding The Competitive Landscape:
I then conducted a SWOT analysis to get a sense of what products already existed for digitally-minded birders. In this research, I looked at direct competitors with digital products and indirect competitors like the Audubon Society with in-person bird watching events.
The 6 apps I studied in my SWOT analysis.
Existing digital products offered several key features:
A bird ID quiz for users to input criteria and identify a bird
A robust database of birds and information about them
Tracking abilities to enable users to log birds they identify
This analysis highlighted the necessity of identification and tracking features. I also identified areas for innovation:
A product for beginning birders. Existing products were geared towards experienced users, as evidenced by bird ID quizzes needing pre-requisite baseline knowledge.
A product that touched on environmental knowledge — important to young birders.
The Insights
I conducted structured interviews to understand:
how beginning birders went bird watching
beginners' feelings about the tools they used while bird watching
the joys and frustrations beginners faced
I recruited 4 target users to speak with, each of whom met my target user criteria:
Between the ages of 18-35, to better understand this rising demographic of birders
Had started bird watching within the past 2 years, thus counting as a beginner
“Bird watching is like a treasure hunt or mystery. When you hear something, or you see a little flicker, and it's like, ‘Oh, is it a bird that I've never seen before?’ It’s the thrill of the hunt.”
These interviews revealed a key motivation for all four birders: the treasure hunt nature of finding and identifying birds. I knew it would be important to tap into this motivation.
“Birding isn't self-evident. There's an initial barrier in terms of what it means to look at a bird and figure out what is the important information to notice: what it's doing, where you saw it, how it engages with the environment, what its body shape is, etc."
Users expressed frustration about starting bird watching. Because birds move quickly and it's challenging to know where to look, users felt unable to notice the details necessary for identification.
“I wish I knew more about migration seasons. If you told me there was a hotspot for migrating birds, that would be an incentive for me to go there.”
All four interviewees spoke enthusiastically about migration seasons. They wanted to know how to track birds migrating throughout the years. I wanted to provide this information to meet the environmental curiosity uncovered in my domain research.
These interviews revealed how beginners engage with existing digital products. Of note, the four users spoke at length about eBird and Merlin.
“Merlin’s bird ID is very frustrating. It asks you about the size of a bird, and you're looking at it and you're like, I don't know. Is it bigger than a crow? It just feels like they need to offer more ways to ID.”
Users felt confused by the ID features in existing products. Products assumed a certain base knowledge about birds (such as size). My product would need to be accessible to true beginners and help them find and identify birds with no former experience.
“With eBird, I wish you could look up a species. What if I really want to see the Short-Eared Owl, for example? Shouldn't I be able to easily look up that specific bird and see all of the hotspots where it's been reported? I just have not found an easy way to do it.”
Although users enjoyed the hotspot feature of eBird, they wanted to find hotspots specific to particular birds. This capability isn’t easily accessible in current products.
Crafting Our Target User and Problem Statement:
New to birdwatching
Dissatisfied with current apps available
Curious about migration seasons
Collector's mentality
I created the persona and empathy map for Rachel, our target user.
After synthesizing my research (through affinity diagramming, empathy maps, jobs to be done, and MoSCoW feature prioritization), I identified the following problem statement:
Beginning bird watchers need a digital product that will help guide, motivate, and track their bird watching because it can be overwhelming to know how to find an identify birds.
Finding The Solution
Designing For Our User's Needs:
Based on interview insights, I blended the ability to search for specific bird hotspots with the curiosity users expressed about migration seasons. I wanted to create a product that would connect beginning birders to migration hotspots and guide them through identification.
I established three principles to help measure success as I ideated around my problem statement:
Simplicity
My design should only contain seasonally relevant birds and tips for identifying those birds to lessen the cognitive load.
Guidance
My design should guide users with clear instructions of how to find birds, no preliminary knowledge necessary.
Motivation
My design should motivate users and promote success and joy.
Sketching Possible Solutions:
When first starting sketching, I looked to products like Pokémon Go and Geocaching, which had successful approaches to guiding users to real-word discovery. Their gamification aligned with my insights about birders being motivated by the scavenger hunt nature of bird watching.
At first, I tried to sketch solutions for two different user needs:
Finding and identifying migrating birds
Finding birds that users could hear but not see
It became clear, however, that the MVP would be most successful if I focused on the first need, as this is where there was an opening in the market and a demonstrated interest from users. I landed on a solution that alerted users to recently-seen migrating birds.
This design would guide users to migratory hotspots with a map inspired by Pokémon Go and Geocaching, with in-app tips to help the user find the bird. I created a task flow diagram to better envision how a user would find and log a bird. Afterwards, I was ready to bring my designs into mid-fidelity.
Creating The Final Designs
Satisfying User Curiosity About Migration Seasons:
I created Birder, a product that would inform users about birds near them during migratory seasons.
The product populates a list of birds that are in migration near the user. This list is regionally and seasonally relevant, thus simplifying the information shown to users and easing the cognitive load. Users can also favorite birds to get notifications of recent sightings.
Guiding Our User To Identification:
My solution helps guide users to bird watch successfully by:
Providing only the most relevant tips on finding a specific bird (not generic biological information about the bird).
Navigating users to recent sightings, with both map and augmented reality views. The AR helps orient users in the space.
Nudging the user with animations of where and what to look for, be it a bird that is usually on the ground or up in the trees.
Creating Rewards To Motivate Users:
Because I've simplified bird identification, users can experience joy rather than frustration. This design sets users up for success by showing them recently-seen migrating birds. In other words, users are encouraged to look for specific birds under favorable conditions.
Once a user has identified a new bird, they are rewarded with a badge, playing into the collector mentality that drives beginning birders. In this way, discovering birds is much like finding a new Pokémon card. It is this gamification that targets the motivations of our target user.
Prototype
Final Product Prototype:
Takeaways
Reflections:
In ths project, I was able to dive deeply into research. I became deeply familiar with the domain, which helped me craft a meaningful, user-centered problem statement.
I appreciated the opportunity to explore a topic that I’m passionate about and create an innovative solution. I enjoyed taking inspiration from non-birding products in my ideation. As a designer, I delight in solutions that span across domains, and Birder invited me to draw from patterns in recreational apps to highlight how bird watching is like gaming and collecting.
Looking Forward:
I would like to take these designs through further user testing and iterations. This testing would be to ensure that the solutions of Birder meet beginner users needs and expectations.