Overview

Birdio was a project created for a user-centered design course aimed to help connect and immerse people in nature during the COVID-19.

During lockdowns, cabin fever was a prevalent sentiment felt amongst all of us stuck at home. My team and I wanted to create an experience for people to get out into nature safely through birdwatching and foster a community of birdwatchers.
Team Members
Kei Hartley, Adam Shah, Niamh Froelich
Duration
10 weeks
My role
Lead UX Designer
The Problem
During COVID-19 there has been a spike in birdwatching as a hobby as people try to stay connected with nature. However, birdwatching is known for being a more niche hobby, where only those with the knowledge, equipment, and passion are able to partake.

This makes birdwatching a challenging hobby to navigate and integrate into as a beginner.
Design Question
How might we support birdwatchers in engaging with and building community while connecting to nature?
Our Solution
Birds of a feature flock together
Birdio is an all-in-one birdwatching app that integrates community building with the resources of a birdwatching app. We aim to make birdwatching accessible to beginners and provides useful features for experts.

Our app eliminates the need for multiple different apps, forums, and community groups by centralizing it all into one place. Integrating social media with fun challenges and detailed databases, Birdio is a one-stop-shop for all birdwatchers to spread their wings.

Timeline

Research
User Interviews
Personas
User Journey Maps
Ideate
Design Requirements
Storyboards
Info Arch
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Design
Lo-Fi Mockups
Wireframes
Hi-Fi Interactive Prototype
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Evaluate
Usability Testing
Iteration
Reflection
User Research
Our team conducted five semi-structured interviews using the same set of questions. The aim of our user interviews was to gain a deeper understanding of our users' motivations, pain points, and processes.
Key Findings
01
"Catch them all" - it's like a game
​Participants mentioned that they keep ''life lists" of birds they've seen, and this excitement with discovering a new species. One participant noting that they want to "catch them all" in reference to Pokemon.
02
Wish to meet & share with others  
Several participants mentioned difficulty finding a birdwatching community. They also mentioned that they enjoyed being able to share their sightings with others, often through social media.
03
Desire to stay aware of recent sightings
Participants mentioned different strategies for trying to keep up-to-date with nearby sightings from other birdwatchers, such as looking for tagged Instagram photos of birds that include the location.
Affinity Diagram
After each team member had conducted their interview, we grouped together common findings using an online whiteboard, Miro, to create an affinity diagram.
Personas
The purpose of our personas was to further understand the goals, pain, desires, and allow us to empathize with the users.

We started off by creating our main persona, Peter, who is a birding hobbyist, based off of a combination of our interviewees. We also created a secondary persona Johana, in order to capture the diversity amongst the bird watching community in terms of experience and goals.
User Journey Map
We developed a user journey map based on the Peter persona. We used our research as well as some of our own outdoor excursion experiences to imagine the course of a day’s bird-watching expedition. Our journey map allowed us to visualize the user’s emotional journey over the course of the experience and aided us in identifying pain points.
Design Requirements
Our design requirements were informed by our user research, personas, and journey map, which all identified key pain points we wanted to address. We wanted to provide the necessary features for a bird watching excursion as well as incorporate novelty through providing a platform for community engagement and interaction.
Requirement #1
Help users to identify bird species they find during an excursion
Requirement #2
Assist users in locating birdwatching spots around their area
Requirement #3
Allow users to contact each other through the platform
Requirement #4
Let users complete challenges specific to their area
Requirement #5
Educate users on birds and conservation
information architecture
We created an informational architecture flowchart to showcase the many ways our users can use our potential birdwatching application at a high-level. We wanted to visualize the user flows to identify potential areas of discontinuity in the user experience.
Lo-fi mockups
Transforming ideas into reality
We created lo-fi flows for three of our main features: create a listing, add a sighting, and view recent sightings.

We decided to forgo the challenge feature at this point due to projected time and scope constraints.  
User testing & Evaluation
We conducted this remote study by asking each participant to complete three tasks, with a specific scenario in mind. As participants complete each task, we noted their process and asked various questions about their experience. The suggestions and our observations were used to modify our designs into our next step, annotated wireframes. ​
Key Findings
01
Need to accommodate in remote areas without service
Many times, people will birdwatch in remote areas where there is no service, so it is important to accomodate for that use case.
02
Want multiple methods to Identify a bird
Some participants do not have the greatest camera, so they would prefer other methods to identify birds besides just taking a picture
03
Desire to engage and grow as a birdwatcher
Our novice birdwatcher participants noted they wish they had more ways to learn about and experience birdwatching
hi-fi mockups
Introducing Birdio...
Finally, I led our efforts of creating high-fidelity mock-ups of four key user flows. My main goal was making sure our designs were consistent and clear.

After feedback, we all agreed to add back in the challenge feature in order to differentiate ourselves from competitors and better fulfill our users' needs. In adding a sighting, we included options for both camera and audio in response to user feedback. We also included an offline mode for bird watchers who explore areas where they won't have service.
Planning an Excursion
Birdwatchers are able to plan an excursion, post a listing, explore others' listings, and invite others to an excursion. Excursions can be public or private based on the birdwatcher's preferences. Birdwatchers are able to keep track of their excursions as well as explore other's listings through two tabs, 'Your Excursions' and "Upcoming".

Exploring Different Challenges

Birdwatchers are able to explore and participate in a variety of challenges based on their location. Birdwatchers are then able to share results and pictures to the corresponding challenge feed with their friends. The 'Discover' tab allows birdwatchers to explore photos, posts, and different challenges, while the 'Your Challenges' tab keeps track of the challenges the user is currently participating in.

Adding a Sighting

Birdwatchers are able to add a bird sighting through either taking a picture or recording an audio recording of the bird calls in order to identify the species. Users are then able to learn more about the species and check through progress in their leaderboard.

Finding Recent Sightings

Birdwatchers are able to search and discover recent bird sightings by other users as well as add their own recent sightings to the community. If users want to  navigate to the sighting, they are able to through a map application that leads them to the direct GPS coordinates of the sighting.
Interactive Prototype
We used the prototyping feature within Figma to create an interactive prototype. This was a great way to see our work in action and test out our flows. Go ahead, try it out!
Reflection
This was my first time working through the entire user-centered design process and wow, I had so much fun! I was enthralled by the prompt, as a nature and outdoor lover myself, and was very excited to create an app from complete scratch. I think my group's biggest strength was our power of teamwork. Early on we established roles based on our own strengths and goals, such as product manager, lead designer, and lead researcher. Our collaboration was based on open and frequent communication, goal-setting, and inclusion.

It wasn't all smooth sailing though. I think two of the biggest challenges presented by this project were the short timeline and narrowing down the scope. As the lead designer for our group, I wanted to spend more time improving the accessibility of our app and to incorporate some education on birdwatching ethics, to better serve our users, but wasn't able to do to time restrictions.
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Though through many late nights and zoom calls, we were able to successfully create a detailed, in-depth high-fidelity prototype that we all are very proud of.

El fin. Thank you for reading!

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Made with ♡ in Seattle