By Emily Chan, Harvard University, Summer 2019 REU

​Hi there! I'm Emily, a rising junior at Harvard studying computer science with a minor in statistics. I'm a week and a half into the HCII REU, and I'm working on two projects with Marti Louw, one of which is Macroinvertebrates.org. I came to the HCII REU because as a computer science major and an artist, I'm interested in learning more about design, and I also want to experience what doing research is like.

Some of my personal goals for the summer are to understand how and why design choices are made, get hands on experience developing tools for users using design principles and user feedback, make something that I can show people/people will actually use, and learn about prototyping with smart devices.

My tasks for Macroinvertebrates.org for the foreseeable future include doing usability testing for the new dichotomous key, glossary, and search functionality; creating an improved popup kit for museums to use to engage kids in macroinvertebrate identification, trying to leverage the high quality media that we have and potentially using smart technologies such as NFC tags, etc.; and possibly working on developing identification quiz practice functionality for the site. 

Identification Task
To gain an understanding of the design challenges at hand, we did an identification task using the current resources available to volunteers--field guides and key printouts. The sheer amount of materials was slightly overwhelming, so as someone with no experience doing macroinvertebrate identification, I just chose two field guides that had pictures and stayed with those. I identified five bugs, four using the field guides and one using the website. What I noticed when using the field guides was that the detailed text descriptions of the bugs was essential for family level identification, but the volume of the text also gets in the way when it comes to order level identification. My process was to first do visual pattern-matching to the order level, and then read the descriptions of ones that looked similar to the specimen to find traits that would help distinguish between families. I was surprised by how identification wasn't as difficult or time-consuming as I anticipated, but I also didn't use most of the materials, and never used a key.
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When I switched to using the website, I tried a similar approach, but the website's organization was slightly different from a field guide (I couldn't just flip through quickly to scan for pictures and then selectively read descriptions), which took some adjusting to. The home page worked well for facilitating my initial pattern-matching approach, but I can see how if I were trying to identify a ambiguous looking larvae, I would want the home page to be more explorable (to be able to zoom in more), since some of the pictures were quite small. Once I clicked through to the order page, I definitely don't think I would have known how to get rid of the diagnostic characteristic boxes obstructing the actual pictures that I wanted to look at. However, since I was already familiar with how to do that, I was able to match the specimen to the common burrowing mayfly just by appearance, but I wasn't able to find the characteristics that might help distinguish between similar looking families in a convenient place. 

For me, this raised the question of whether the purpose of Macroinvertebrates.org is primarily to be a learning resource or an identification resource. 

​During my time here at CMU, my main focus was to conduct website usability tests and take what I learned from them to design a mobile companion app. At the same time, however, I got abundant exposure to the research process and the intricacies involved in conducting successful research. Things I did outside of designing the app included:

• Look at existing learning technology research and taxonomy/identification mobile apps and write a report on what I learned
• Write a script for a site tutorial to be used in usability tests and for a tutorial video
• Make a list of all features on the site and turn into checklist to be used in usability tests
• Update usability test protocol
• Make usability test post-survey into a Google form
• Transcribe usability tests
• Synthesize data from usability tests
• Learn React Native to develop app
• Document entire app design/development process
• Obtain clearances for conducting research
• Edit specimen images using Photoshop
• Upload edited images to Gigapan and update spreadsheet with information about each image
• Implement glossary hyperlinks on website through CAT
• Trim videos to upload as additional media on website
• Research options for new technology: tablets, GoPros
• Set up and test audio and video equipment: Zoom recorders, GoPros
• Attend MD DNR training for data collection and conduct think-aloud studies
• Conduct think-aloud studies with PPC Young Naturalists
• Learn about analyzing video data
• Make my final poster

I could not have asked for a better first research experience and am incredibly grateful for my mentors, Jessica and Marti, who have put in considerable effort to make my experience educational, fulfilling, and enjoyable. I am very lucky to have worked on a project that has effects so immediate and so far-reaching. Through my usability tests, I was able to talk with people from places as far as Quebec, see first-hand how excited they were about the website, and hear how helpful it would be to them and their colleagues and students. It was very motivating to be reminded that our work would not only be indirectly impacting the health of the environment, but also directly impacting many people’ lives. Coming into this project, I was unsure of whether I wanted research to be in my future, but this experience has convinced me that it is certainly not off the table.

One of my main projects this summer was to design and develop a mobile companion app for macroinvertebrates.org. Initially, I had to decide whether to make a reference app that would essentially give information like the website does or make a game that would allow people to practice identification. I got feedback from my mentors, and at this point I had also started conducting usability tests for the alpha version of the website, so I got a feel for what users would use the site for and what was most important to them. I decided to do a reference app that would be a simplified offline version of the site, since this would be most helpful to people doing identification out in the streams, where Wi-Fi and cellular service can be unreliable.

In order to scale the site down into a mobile app that can be used offline, I had to figure out which features on the site were most important to include and how to include them without compromising user experience. I iterated my design a few times based on feedback from my mentors and from website usability tests, and once I was happy enough with the design, I conducted usability tests with the Young Naturalists at Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy. Here is an example of how one screen (the full specimen view) changed throughout the process:

After I had already submitted my poster, I had a meeting with the designers of the website and made further changes to the prototype, which can be found here: https://marvelapp.com/db804b9/.

Because it has yet to undergo usability testing, the current design is not final. Next steps would be to do more usability tests on the prototype, make any necessary changes again, and finally develop the app. I had started development using React Native, a framework created by Facebook for building apps using JavaScript and React. However, the design has changed drastically, my time on this project is ending, and I am a beginner to app development, so the best way for this app to be built successfully is if someone with app development experience takes over. Once we find that person, they will pick up where I left off and hopefully turn my design into reality.​

​I conducted 8 usability tests for the alpha version of macroinvertebrates.org. Participants consisted primarily of people who had previously expressed in a survey that they were interested in usability testing for the website, so most of them were relatively advanced in macroinvertebrate identification. My interviews were conducted in four main parts: opening background questions, unguided exploration of the site, site tutorial, and closing questions. Overall, participants gave positive feedback. Some of them had used the older version of the site, and others were seeing macroinvertebrates.org for the first time. Most thought the site was easy to use and especially liked how interactive and high-quality the photos were.
Many suggestions for improvements to the site were made, shown below. The most commonly suggested changes were adding tooltips (hover boxes) to the set of view control buttons in the upper right, making the blue plus sign more intuitive, making the expanded character list more noticeable, and making the flip arrow button more intuitive. Many of these usability issues could be solved by having a site tutorial video or popup tutorial boxes to guide users through the site when they visit for the first time. Certain features of the site that often went unnoticed or were hard to find, such as the blue plus sign, expanded character list, and flip arrow button, would benefit from redesign. Changes were constantly being made to the website, so some features had already changed by the time I conducted my last usability test. For example, the expanded character list was moved to the Diagnostic Characters tab, and glossary hyperlinks were added to the overviews and expanded character lists.
Some people requested that certain information be added to the site. Multiple people wanted a ruler/scale to show size reference, more information about life span and different life stages, and location/distribution maps. People also pointed out that the site’s information is so thorough that it may be overwhelming for beginners. Overall, however, people were very happy with the site, said it would be useful to them in their work, and were excited to share it.

Hello! Joyce again, from the REU program at Carnegie Mellon University.

This summer I spent a lot of time thinking about how macroinvertebrates.org should handle search returns. An important step in this process was to understand how other scientific databases online were handling this functionality. From the Encyclopedia of Life website (eol.org), I found a particularly interesting search ability that could be well-applied to macroinvertebrates.org. 

When searching for information on Encyclopedia of Life, search returns are categorized into the following "types": Taxa, Images, Videos, Sounds, Articles, Traits, Links, People, Communities, Collections, and About EOL. All types of information are shown initially, but the user can narrow down the list of results by clicking on specific types. This seemed very applicable to macroinvertebrates.org, especially once we customize our "types" of information.

After discussing within our team at CMU and speaking with Maddie, we chose the most important "types" to be: Taxa, Glossary Terms, Characters, Images, and Videos. We concluded that these categories best cover the information that volunteers would immediately want to find. Below you'll find several mockups I created, displaying how a volunteer might search for specific information.

Example A: The user is searching for general information about mayflies. Search results of all types are returned (in the mockup, we see Taxa, Image, and Video types explicitly represented).