Mobile App Pt. II: New Team, New Ideas!

By Alice Fang

🐞📱

Re-framing with a new team!
Chelsea and I were joined by Estelle (Yi Cheng) Jiang and Dakota (Zi Qi) Dong in late May. Moving forward, Chelsea and Dakota will be working on development, while Estelle and I will be working on the design and user-testing of the app. There was an adjustment period as we introduced the project to the new members and got everyone acquainted while figuring out how to work collaboratively in a remote wfh environment. 

Through this process, we've been utilizing google docs and spreadsheets, as well as Figma, but coordinating between design and development has been tricky. Accommodating and synching the design and development timelines was difficult, and it was a bit touch-and-go.

Spreadsheets and Organizing Data
Previously, I struggled with establishing a structure to the app that allowed for navigation in and out of orders/families. To make the taxonomy clear (as we are non-scientists and non-bug experts), and to organize the information for design purposes, I created a spreadsheet with the following:​

1. Inventory of functions that exist on the website​
In order to figure out the minimum viable product that can be developed by students within a summer, and to compare what needs to change from Order to Family, I listed all of the functions for Order/Family/Genus.

 2. List of insect orders, the families in each order, and the number of specimen (genera) in each family, and the number of diagnostic characters for each family and order 

While many of the families have similar numbers of specimen, there were a lot of outlier cases we needed to keep an eye on, and account for while designing. The length of names, both common and scientific, impacts the typographic system, and the number of diagnostic characters affects how we visually set up that information. Some of the cases are as follows:

• Greatest number of diagnostic characters in a family is 8 (most families range 2-4)
• In comparison, the range of Order diagnostic characters is 1–3
• Longest scientific name: Polycentropodidae
• Shortest scientific name: Dixidae
• Longest common name: Broad-Shouldered Water Striders, Shortlegged Water Striders, Riffle Bugs
• Shortest common name: Darners​

*Dev team has to set up the database (I don’t know the exact details). We ran into a challenge late in the summer [early August] where the Gigapan database had to be moved, and there was no way to extract some of the family traits and text information, requiring manual copy and pasting

Collecting References and Resources for Ideation Round II
Getting the design team on the same page.

I showed Estelle the previous mockups and ideas that I had for the mobile app, but in order to refresh and sort of create a mutual visual language, we took the time to research and look at other apps. We compared and discussed field guide apps, quiz apps, and other text-based apps like news/media.

Estelle's feedback + insights

*Referencing Headspace, AirBnB, Medium, WWF Together

Alice’s Points:

• Organizing info: list vs. grid (text vs. image)
• Switching back from family to order (internal navigation)
• Making clear important areas of app (use as field guide) and what information to highlight (ie. pollution tolerance vs. life history; diagnostic characters as learning tool)​

*Referencing Twitter, Google Maps, Medium Merlin ID, Audubon

Lo-fi Version 2
New Ideas and Changes

Estelle quickly mocked some basic page structures, and documented user stories. This allowed us to see possible entry points and user profiles for the app. What are possible ways people would use the app? What would they be looking for? And how do we prioritize that development at the same time?

User Stories

She also created this flow diagram of entry in the app and access points to different functions; however, it didn't include navigation and returning to previous pages, or other major functions we hope to implement in the future, like a quiz.

Home Page and Order Page Templates that Estelle created

• High level navigation → broad view of orders with the drop-down menu!
• Actually designing a home page! :-) that is visually interesting and hopefully incites curiosity
  

Scroll-up Popup for additional information, as well as an 'introduction' to the Order Page

*Comparing what a bottom pop-up that scrolls up, and a button on the bottom, would look like.

Between a button to expand, and swiping up, we originally decided on a swiping up action, but were worried about the screen experience that it would be too hidden on the bottom of the screen. As we moved into user testing, we created a button on the bottom for accessibility instead. It stood out more, and for someone holding a phone, was located in a position that was easy to access.

Through this process, we also started to get into the look and feel of the application. As the focus and beauty of the collection is the high definition images and close-up thumbnails, I really wanted typography to play a role in the visual style while staying close to what the desktop site looks like.