NestNet: Unlock the World of Wings
Taking the mission of connecting the bird loving community, NestNet was proposed – an easy-to-use mobile app supporting birders’ essential tasks (e.g., bird identification and recording) as well as social activities (e.g., knowledge sharing, in-person birding events).
NestNet was envisioned not only to be the digital home for bird enthusiasts, but also be a handy tool assisting general public to deepend their understanding of the birds and the environment around them.
Project Background
Bird watching has been a cherished pastime for centuries and continues to captivate millions in the present day. On searching Facebook groups, numerous groups with over 1,000 members can be found, and they are actively organizing birdwatching events and sharing daily bird-related posts on daily basis.
3 major issues were identified with the mainstream birding platforms now.
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Limited flexibility of use, either requiring rigid steps or professional knowledge to operate the system.
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The service layout separates amateur birders from professional birders.
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Missing the social needs of the birders, which forces the bird loving community to build their social space on other general social-oriented platforms, namely Reddit or Facebook. Online forums, such as reddit, provided limited functionalities in organizing activities and the discussion thread is not optimized for organizing activities as well. Hence, users can find it hard to organize birdwatching events using existing forums.
Tools
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Figma
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Photoshop
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GoogleDoc
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Qualtrics
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Discord
Team
UX Design and Research
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Haoyue
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Han
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Jiuyu
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Shuyu
My Role
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Information Architecture
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Wireframing
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UI prototyping
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Usability Testing
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Report Writing
Timeline
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Overall: 5 weeks
Link to Interactive Prototype
Design Process and Iterations
Storyboard
Information Architecture
Wireframes
Usability Test
The current study utilized think aloud and post walk-through as the observational techniques and questionnaire as the query technique.
11 participants based in Melbourne were recruited via convenient sampling.
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The tasks were selected to test out the major functions of NestNet and some functions with complex flows (e.g. creating new events was a complex flow, Hotjar, 2023). All the usability tests were conducted in-person, where participants interact with the NestNet prototype on the facilitator's iPhone.
NestNet evaluation results: current problems, user needs, and design implications
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Main Findings
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8/11 participants mentioned they would like to search by the birds’ physical appearance (e.g., blue, small) on the birdy-pedia page; while the search bar of the current prototype is stuffed with “search by names” that makes participants feel less confident of getting accurate results when they don’t know the bird’s name.
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The current prototype classifies events as a sub-type of discussion, but 8/11 participants had difficulty assuming such association and tend to treat event and discussion as different things. The participants therefore expected they were able to create event-typed posts.
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6/11 participants mentioned that after they joined the event, they expect a clear entrance to the event-based group chat right on the same page.
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The current prototype separates event-related functions across the community tab and home tab, which confuses 8/11 participants (across 9 comments). Taken this together with the findings 2 and 3, it suggested that users need a unified entrance to a dedicated event tab or section where participants can complete all the event event-related tasks (i.e., browse/search/filter events, create a new event, view joined events, enter event-based group chat) in the same place.
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5/11 participants (across 7 comments) mentioned they expected they could search, filter, and create new discussion when they are on the view all discussion page.
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Integrating these design modifications also aligns with the usability heuristics of consistency & standard (Nielsen, 2020).
Final UI Iteration
Home
Based on feedback 2 through feedback 7 (in Table), we changed the “upcoming events” into “events”, which becomes an entrance to all the event-related functions.
A notification bell-button of updates on users posts and events was added to further enhance the visibility of the system and providing quick access to those destinations.
Join an Event
Now after joining an event, a slide panel will show up displaying the event details, solving the problem of feedback 6 & 7, encouraging access to the group chat feature and now the users can quick navigate to the original post of that event.
Event
Now clicking into the ‘Event’ section, the users can view events categorized in all and joined ones. We enabled event filtering by dates and locations following feedback 2. Following the usability heuristics of visibility of the system’s status, a red dot will be shown on the filter icon once the user applied filters.
Create an Event
The flow of ‘Creating an Event’ has been updated according to feedback 2 & 3. Now the users can create an event without having to create a discussion thread, still, they are given the option to post their event description as a discussion thread to attract more participations. Users will receive status feedback once they’ve successfully created an event.
Bird Detail
In bird details page, the sections of ‘introduction’ and ‘co-edit’ was further specified based on feedback 11. Additionally, the users will be able to share their image search results according to feedback 13.
Community
In Community page, the wording of the posting process has been updated according to feedback 3 and 10 to eliminate the confusion. After clicking on the ‘New’ button on the top right, the users can select from ‘Thread’ and ‘Moment’, all with explanatory words of their differences.
Threads
On the view-all-threads page, users now can search for specific thread as well as do some filtering, fulfilling user needs reflected in feedback 8. We also enable a “+” create new post function at the top-right corner, fulling the user needs reflected in feedback 9. Following feedback 2, an event tag in the final UI also allows users to differentiate whether a discussion thread contains any event element.
Birdy-Pedia
Based on feedback 1, that it was not straightforward to look for a bird based on their characteristics, now a filtering panel was added on top of searching for them to conduct more specific searches. Enabling filters also aligns with the heuristics of recognize rather than recall, where users are provided with, for example, birds’ potential colors for them to recognize.
Profile
In profiles, based on feedback 16, the users now can view their post history. By clicking on either top left trophy icon or the text ‘Bird Captured’, they are still able to view a collection of all their captured birds.
Evaluation & Future Directions
Millions of people around the world enjoys birding, yet bird enthusiasts currently might need to switch between different platforms for bird identification (e.g., Merlin Bird ID), recording birds’ locations (e.g., eBird), and sharing their birding experiences (e.g., Reddit).
Three major issues with existing birding apps/platforms considers
(1) rigid user experience and high entry bar for usage
(2) difficulty in connecting armature and expert birding cohorts who are “trapped” in different birding apps
(3) birders rely on external platforms for socializing, which requires additional effort (i.e., switch apps) for knowledge sharing.
To fill this gap, we proposed NestNet as an all-in-one digital birding space for birders to search birds, record bird observations, and connect with each other. We envision NestNet to be not only a social space for knowledge sharing, but also as a handy tool for the general public to appreciate the birds they encounter in daily lives and lower the effort for beginner birders to participate in birding.
After the iterations, however, even though we’ve removed the frequently reported event vs. discussion differentiation in the final prototype, it warrants further usability tests to investigate (a) whether users can intuitively perceive the difference between thread and moment when creating a post, and (b) whether the thread vs. moments post types provides any additional value to bird enthusiasts using NestNet. In future testings, we would like to reach out to our target audiences – the birder community – to test our prototypes in the birding context to further advance the usability of NestNet.
Additionally, during the usability test, we observed around 4/11 users “accidentally” discovered the image search function by clicking on the camera icon. We therefore consider providing a brief onboarding tutorial to familiarize users with NestNet’s flagship functions. As a common practice in industry (heuristics of “consistency & standards”, Nielsen, 2020), adding an onboarding tutorial would provide new users more confidence about what NestNet can do, and thus further improve usability of NestNet.
Lastly, NestNet currently relies on admin staff to monitor and moderate the collaboratively edited contributions in birdy-pedia and the thread and events. In future iterations, we hope to improve the moderation and monitoring mechanisms of NestNet by actively involving users into the process. For example, expert users can approve and correct an editing of a beginner user; users can report suspicious events or discussion that is unrelated to birding. We hope these monitoring mechanisms would encourage NestNet users to shape NestNet as into a vibrant and pleasant community focused on birding.