Sprint 1: Interaction Design

My task was to create a prototype of an app that would aid non-professional researchers in collecting some sort of environmental data. I decided to create a prototype of an app called Campus Wildlife that allows researchers who are interested in animal census data on the University of Washington campus to document and count animals they come across. To start off the project, I created a list of all the possible features that the researchers would find useful. Then, I chose 5 features that would belong on the homescreen of the app, and created a diagram of the interactions I expected the user to perform.

Then I created all the screens on gridded notecards that the app would show in my prototype, and I sorted them with arrows that indicate the process the user goes through to complete their tasks. When I was satisfied with how the screens looked and the user interaction process, I uploaded all the screens into POP and created the demo that you will see below.

Obstacles

One of the things I thought about while creating the app was that I did not have a way to detect if users and non-reaserchers attempted to upl0ad false sightings that would screw up the data that everyone is trying to use. It would be interesting to learn about ways companies and other app creaters find ways to prevent this from happening to insure that all the data is accurate and worthy of being used. Another challenge this project presented was that we were required to include a feature that would motivate researchers to use my app. This was hard to demonstrate because I would hope the researchers are self-motivated to figure out what they need to figure out, and that they would just use my app as an easy and intuitive way to assist them in their process. In the end, I decided to create a point-system that gives the user points with each animal you document, but I still feel like that this feature doesn’t fit well in software like this.

Reflection

This project was a joy to work on, as I found myself spending hours in study rooms happily problem-solving, drawing, and arranging all my screens. When you actually have to be the creator of something, it opens your eyes to what interactions you need to have to make the application make sense to the user. Over the past couple of months I have tried to pay attention to how I am interacting with different software on my phone and my laptop, but now that I have critically thought about the interaction to create a software prototype, my understanding of person-software interaction has taken a great leap forward.