National Geographic

Digital birdwatching journal.

 
 
 

Summary.


 

I designed an app for birdwatchers, beginners and experts alike. Essentially turning a catalogue book, journal/diary and audio guides in to one comprehensive app.

Get the app and read the reviews here: National Geographic Birds: Field Guide to North America.

iPhone and iPad versions in a universal app.

 
 
 

The pitch.


 

Together with another UX designer, we created a concept for a pitch NatGeo held and won it.

Since searching for birds is the main activity, we decided to start immediately with the list of birds. From here swiping right brings the menu with other activities and swiping left the filters for the birds.

This animation was part of the pitch that won us the case and not the final app.

 
 

The brief.


 
  • Turn a birdwatching field guide with 990 birds in to a meaningful that can be taken with you anywhere you go.

  • Figure out what birdwatchers need, both beginners and experts.

  • Analyse competition and figure out what is missing and what makes an app better than a book.

  • Make ploughing through the pages of the physical copy a breeze with intuitive search tools. 

  • Utilise the possibilities that mobile computing could bring to birdwatchers.

  • Keep in mind that birdwatchers are also holding binoculars, so make the app one-hand use. 

 

My role.


 

I created about 50% of the concepts, UX and their wireframes and had a really good time doing all this.

I also created the small little microinteractions some the icons have in After Effects to create playfulness and visual feedback of succesful interactions.

 

Co-creation workshops.


 

For this project we held participatory design workshops together with one of the illustrators and authors of the physical book as well as National Geographic's representative.

In these workshops we created first all the ideas related to just finding the correct bird in the list and then the extra activities users might need. A lot of paper prototypes were created after the ideation workshop, so we could keep the functions and navigation models we want and discard those we don't. This helped us to create the functions and navigation in a very short timeframe.

 

Wireframes & user flow.


 

The app, the whole app and nothing but the app. That's a lot wireframing. Twice a week we changed a bunch them when discussing with the client. Especially the unique feature, digital journal, explained below, demanded a lot of input from National Geographic's bird watching master.

We decided to do this type of combined wireframe/user flow system where wireframes are compiled in to logical blocks that is easy to follow. This was before prototyping existed in any meaningful way.

 

Digital journaling.


 

Bird watchers keep a journal of the birds they have spotted. Each watcher has their way to mark up where and when and how they spotted a bird.

We desired to bring this journal keeping in to the app, mostly for beginning bird watchers, to keep track of their findings. We imagined this as a strategy to get beginner birdwatchers interested in both birdwatching and the app.

Hip youngsters will also share their sightings, so you can Tweet (pun intended) or share via Facebook.  

 

Most of the time bird watchers go somewhere to spot birds. In the journal we call these "events". This way all the birds you have spotted in a location gets recorded in to an event, along with the weather data as well as GPS coordinates and time and date. Automagically!