Hey, Iām Jane Mengtian Zhang, a UX / interaction designer based in SF bay area. I strive to create effective and elegant designs.
I enjoy my daily doodles and mind-drifting in my design space, and perhaps a bit of coding, whenever necessary :) Feel free to check on my projects or drop me a message.
Thanks for stopping by!
Proxibio is a mobile application that provides information of local species, encourages learning and discovery in local biodiversity. The system is designed on the mobile platform in order to support everyday use and quick, easy access to information in context of a medium-sized neighborhood.
Ever curious about your friendly neighbor, who does not have a name?
Nearly everyone has the experience of gazing upon a mysterious being, the amazingly strange yet strangely familiar residents that share our neighborhood. It could be a squirrel passing through a road, a falcon flying across the sky, or a nameless flower, blooming quietly alongside our everyday path to school. We would like to know more about our neighbors, yet such curiosity fades away quickly, as we walked past the strange being into our own daily matters.
To gain accurate information based on these random encounters is no easy task. It is unlikely that people would have a local species guide in their pocket all the time. Other information resources, such as google, wikipedia search, and various online biodiversity databases, require dedicated time and effort for searching, and inevitably rely on user's base knowledge in order to yield reliable information.
The purpose of this design exercise, is to understand the curiosity people expereince when coming across natural beings around them, and to explore ways of organizing / presenting biodiversity information resources, turning user's transient curiosity into a sustained learning experience. To reach the goal of education and sustained learning, the solution needs to be easily learnable, highly efficient and engaging for long-term use. Except from core values such as accuracy and reliability, I intend to explore novel ways of presenting biodiversity knowledge, which is highly contextual and closely connected to the neighborhood as a whole.
bridging the gap between random curiosity and sustained learning of biodiversity knowledge requires a system that is time-efficient, encouraging, and provides understandable information to general users. A clear view of user base and existing systems of similarity granted me a better understanding in the position of proxibio, serving as a starting point of the design project.
User Base
Design Approach
Comparative Analysis
I utilized culture probes to unveil interests and learning behaviours of potential users regarding to biodiversity knowledge. A selected group of users were given a set of material including a map of UM campus, blank or written postcards, clippings of wildlife images and traces, as well as stickers and blank cards that were open to free use. Participants were free to interact with the cultural probes within a week's time. Culture probes were re-collected and analyzed afterwards.
The results of the culture probe study provided valuable insights which inspired my later ideation process. Users had various ways of interacting with the probe materials, including annotating photos and maps, re-visualizing contexts of a certain discovery, illustrating or writing down short stories relevant to a certain species, and random doodling on natural artifacts. Among the analysis results, I find it especially inspiring how users enjoy to frame their discovery of species in vivid stories, all connected to a variety of artifacts representing diifferent perspectives of a discovery experience. Users also showed strong interest when interacting with representations of natural objects (illustration prints or photo cutouts of leaves, seeds, and footprints), as if the objects themselves possess life stories of their own. The use of culture probes allowed me to empathize with potential users, and more importantly inspired some of the core design concepts in my later design process, such as discovery and collection space.
Based on the information gathered from the cultural probes, I brainstormed and sketched a total 40 design alternatives. Each design solution was relatively independent and addresses a very specific issue. After several rounds of discussions asnd critiques on these ideas, the most valuable and viable ideas were selected, mainly surrounding species identification, biodiversity knowledge exploration, and sharing of discovery experience. These selected ideas served as the major building blocks for the later system design.
With the main functions narrowed down, I utilized personas, scenarios and storyboards to frame these envisioned ideas and functions into real-world user experience. From this point, the system structure started to come clear, and thus required considerations in more detailed functionalities and interactions.
After the stage of ideation and selection, I created a set of paper prototype to communicate and test this gradually forming concept. The prototype includes a cardboard phone frame, paper cards as pages, sliders, and notification banners to imitate an interactive mobile system. The paper prototype demonstrates the core app concept to potential users in a time-efficient manner, and allowed me to identify design issues early in the design process.
The digital prototype added small features that smoothen user experience, such as control panels, tab menus, pop-up messages, etc. Apart from incorporating functional suggestions from the first testing cycle, digital prototype included various views of a given species object to better answer for user's needs.
The first major iteration was prototyped in Proto.io. For more information on this iteration, please refer to Iteration I Final Writeup , or view the Presentation Slides for a simplified explanation.
Discover your neighborhood that is connected and alive
The final design concept of Proxibio as of iteration 2 presents a local-based knowledge system that facilitates species discovery, nurtures connection with natural beings, and encourages exploration of related natural objects in a contextual setting. The application provides fast, reliable access to local species information that are easy to understand, while also encourages long-term engagement and growth through discovery and engagement.
Key features of Proxibio include:
With a few taps on the screen, users can quickly narrow down possible identification results for a species they have discovered on the go. Identification results present the most essential info for quick recognition of key characteristics of a give species. User may choose to identify species right on the spot, or save an entry for later reference.
User has a chance to obtain a natural object as a reward upon discovery of species, or upon completing other forms of interaction with the local community. The reward system is both a means to enhance engagement and an additional channel to related knowledge discovery.
With an expansive map view and dynamic activity feed, the homepage of Proxibio is designed to help users discover what is happening in the natural environment around them at the moment. Users may share their discoveries in forms of image uploads, unidentified species, questions, interesting facts, etc.
Discoveries serve as the major units of the Proxibio info system structure, which is further connected to species catalogue, personal space, gallery and map views for a given species, etc.
Slightly differentiated from the filtered list presented as identification results, the species library provides a comprehensive view of species info. Apart from basic info and characteristics, each species entry provides a discovery map view, a seasonal gallery, and a relationship map view to allow users to further explore the connections between the neighborhood, the community, and the natural objects.
While exploring, user can easily navigate to related discovery entries, or info pages of a related species and natural objects. The ontology-based info structure aims to facilitate knowledge discovery when user has some free time to browse through the catalogue, and also surfaces the very nature of deep connection within the sbiodiversity knowledge system.
Similar to the public discovery feed, a personal space is maintained for each user's past discoveries and collection of natural objects. The space is a registry of user engagement and growth along with the community, helping users keep track of their own discovery and community contributions.
Proxibio is designed to be a space where users continuously discover, learn, and maintain deep connection with nature; and most importantly, an information space users feel connected to and become willing to dwell in. A personal space thus becomes essential for creating an engaging and welcoming user experience.
As the design challenge of Proxibio goes, open issues continues to show up, along with opportunities of future design explorations.
- Scalability for neighborhoods of various sizes. The ideation of Proxibio is based on a mid-size community (ideally a small town or city) and may be less suitable for large cities, or communities that are more disconnected or scattered. Keeping the info system local-based helps immensely to facilitate discovery and identification on-the-spot, yet also creates problems when the boundaries of a "local" setting is hard to define.
- Educational use. The current design of Proxibio is analogous to a pocket book of local species, focused on the "general crowd", with the mian functionalities kept simple and tightly surrounding knowledge access and discovery. However, with a strong focus on discovery and engagement, a biodiversity knowledge platform as such might have potential for educational usage, eg. for teenagers and aspiring scientists or biologists. The special needs for these user groups open up new possibilities such as gamification and integration into other knowledge materials.
- Outside of a mobile app: While the form of mobile application enables user to discover and identify species on the go, the expansive knowledge content included in Proxibio require supportive platforms as knowledge base once the initial user curiosity is successfully maintained. Learnability and accessibility is always a mere start; once users are eager for more accurate and extensive information needs, proxibio may also need to be ready for the change.
- Those who dwell, or those who travel? Proxibio is designed to be local-based to facilitate identification, and also to maximize usage of local community in knowledge sharing and discovery. A switch is provided in the settings to browse species not limited to neighborhood, yet Proxibio is not the ideal companion for travelers, unless our users decide to frame every discovery in such a setting. Something for travelers may open up possibilities to new features, modifications, even a new design concept if a holistic experience can be framed.
The design challenge of Proxibio is still ongoing. If you are interested in latest progresss from this project, feel free to contact me for latest updates. Thanks again for dropping by! :)
