- RINO App
- Gambit App
RINO App: A Zoo Admin's Assistant
[Regulator of Information and Navigable Operations]
A friend of mine from college created the education department for Racine Zoo in Wisconsin from the ground up. They have 16+ programs dedicated to conservation and animal education on top of other events at the zoo. For the last five years, she’s been working with common tools like Outlook, Gmail, and Excel with little success in finding a program that can accurately consolidate many of the tasks that entail staffing for animal care.
Needing to jump through various applications for animal handling creates a large margin of potentially dangerous errors! While Microsoft Excel and Outlook have their functions in the zoo administrator's life, they are not a consolidated substitute for what the client was looking for.
App Requirements
The app was required to solve three major tasks, which included the ability to:
-Plug in animal information and rules associated with them (including rules about how long animals can be out)
-Plug in educators as they’re clear to handle specific animals
-Generate a list of suggested animals for events based on the above parameters
With emerging young, educated professionals in the zoological field, the RINO app helps serve as an organizer for driven coordinators. These diligent workers are the bridge between conservation education and internal cooperation. They deserve to have an app that works according to their needs.
RESEARCH PHASE
Market Analysis
While trying to research apps to help with animal handling, it became very clear right away that this was a novel problem to solve. When speaking with my client, she had mentioned that no such app existed in the field. In an attempt to figure out what features worked and were valued, I conducted an interview while writing down the pros and cons of the programs that were currently used at Racine Zoo.
"Having to use multiple platforms drastically increases the chance for errors...I just really want things to work and work in a timely manner..."
Conducting a survey while asking both quantitative and qualitative questions, revealed what our client valued most.
Who valued most from a streamlined process?
How long on average does it take to submit a staffing form?
What is most important to consider when working for the zoo?
Our client informed us that it goes through at least five iterations of confirmation between different department heads before the schedule is finally posted (and they each have to deal with their own personal programs)!
Creating a word cloud from our interview notes revealed the key words that our client would use to describe their position and what they wanted for the staff! Animals and Educators were no surprise, but seeing words like Mistakes, Order, and Rules really drove home that they needed something that WORKED.
EMPATHIZING WITH THE USER
leads the education department with compassion and consideration for the safety of staff, guests, and animals. She prioritizes accessible education and making sure that staffing needs consistently and accurately reflect the needs of the zoo.
Pain points: Too many apps, simple tasks fail too readily, currently no way to auto-generate suggestions
is an Education Lead who focuses on the daily face-to-face interactions between staff, animals, and the guests. With a degree in Animal Conservation, he values teaching others about the importance of biodiversity and conservation efforts of zoos.
Pain points: communication issues between departments, outdated information can lead to safety issues, need for quick and accurate updates isn't readily available with current systems
What steps do our audience need to take to complete the task of organizing their events and animal handlers? Through our empathy map and storyboarding, we strip the path to its simplest form to focus on keeping the process succinct but effective.
A great way to break down the steps needed to make the app a positive experience for our client. It was crucial to make sure that information was easily accessible in the least amount of steps and laid out intuitively.
THE DESIGN PROCESS
There were many ways to approach designing RINO. What better way than to sketch and take notes quickly throughout the ideation phase. This was a great opportunity to focus on the what and the how of the app. Some major hurdles I wanted to tackle were how to easily categorize information in an effective but simple way and the presentation of the overall app to include all the details the client wanted.
I wanted to use tags as the easiest and most navigable process, because it is intuitive and customizable based on the user's needs. I iterated the main events page of the app several times, and found that having the tags system helped solve the issue of creating unique rules for animals, suggestions, and event needs.
With limited time during a sprint, it's imperative to get ideas out quickly and efficiently! For the design, I made a small booklet that helped mimic the tabs of the app. It aided in visualizing what would would be displayed up front, and the backside of each tab would have a small sketch of how other screens may appear.
During the paper prototyping process, I wanted to give consideration for colors and moods of the app. It should feel fresh and lively like the animals and plants you would see at the zoo. The colors were meant to evoke a very natural and refreshing feeling for our users. While the not all of the colors were used in the design, I kept the greens and lighter oranges/yellows to make the palette more inviting!
After creating so many paper sketches, it was time to gather the best ideas into InVision. It allowed me to look at functionality and flow before moving forward with prototyping.
This shows the interactions in practice! What changes can be made to the interface for better user experience? I touched up the main features while improving assets to make sure they were accessible and consistent with our vision for RINO.
Link to Prototype.
With limited time and resources, I spent a great deal of time with my client in discussing how the internal systems of RINO could be improved. Overall, she was very pleased with the app's simple and functional design! The hope is to go through several new iterations of development and testing to gather more feedback in the future. Currently, I have been working on creating a better visual design as can be seen by the slides below.
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