Animallives.org is a web application developed by Yale and NASA for scientists to track the movement of animal lives around the world. I worked alongside 3 other product designers to identify the animallives.org target audience and build a working high fidelity prototype for the next stage of development. We wore many hats as product designers for this project, working on research, information architecture, UX design, storytelling, and UI design.
There is a wide breadth of animal tracking data available to scientists in large sets, but the data is often displayed in ways which lack beauty and meaningful interactions. Animallives.org aims to be the solution by presenting this data in beautiful, organized, and personalized ways to inform policy and scientific research. The Yale Center for Biodiversity and Global Change in conjunction with NASA partnered with user experience collaborators to aid in the re-imagining of the site.
"Identify the animallives.org target audience".
“Create a website centered around animal movement data representations that are clear, credible, aesthetically appealing, and readily actionable by users.”
At handoff, we left our clients with reports, prototypes, and mockups to empower their next stage of development.
Our team was unfamiliar with the wildlife research field. Research helped us understand the field, target animallives.org users, and understand their needs, behaviors, and preferences.
1. Determine what our target users want from animallives.org, especially in relation to other sites and tools they might already be using to work within this problem space.
2. Extrapolate what those users might want but don’t yet realize they do given their current behaviors.
We refined our research goals into a set of clear and precise research questions that directly address our project goals:
Answering these research questions helped to define what terms from our project goals like “clear”, “aesthetically appealing”, and “readily actionable” mean in the context of our users and their work.
ur user interviews have were the backbone of our user research and by extent our product design; They have confirmed and denied some initial assumptions as well as uncovered unexpected user data trends.
We conducted a competitor analysis to better understand what product niche we can best fit into as well as what features to focus on developing first versus later. We were curious to see what features our competitors offered, and how. We gathered images and specific design details from each platform to cross-reference all of them in a table
We created a design rationale document to report how research data rationalized design decisions. This report document highlighted our user-centric approach to the design phase, and our in depth competitive research.
To aid developers in building the prototype, we developed a UX specification that covers all screens. This report is extremely detailed and intended to be used by web developers when designing the front end of animallives.org. For organization, we have included this in the appendix.
We validated our designs by conducting virtual Zoom usability tests with our Animal Lives High Fidelity Mockup Prototypes using Figma in comparison with two competitor sites (Map of Life and Audubon Explorer). Here we compared the efficiency and excitement of our stakeholders using our prototype. This allowed for us to observe how efficiently and accurately users find information through Animal Lives so we can best receive feedback and make our final design.
Towards the end of our iterative testing phase, we ideated a new style of search based on more competitive research. We hypothesized that this new style of search would be even more intuitive than moving the “cart/backpack” to the right of the screen, because it “previewed” how data cards would appear on the map more accurately.
After analyzing our usability testing data, we confirmed our hypothesis. We also confirmed that the app flow of animallives.org was simpler and more exciting for participants than competitor app flows.
Following my work with animallives.org, I returned to work as a freelance webdesigner to build the landing page using webflow. Case study coming soon!
