Inforest
As an agroforestry research application, InForest aims to not only increase the accuracy and efficiency of forest data collection, but also provide researchers with a better way to share and display their data with students and other researchers.
WHAT
DALI Project
WHEN
Winter 2022
Case Study: Digital Design
Team
Timeframe
Summary
UI/ UX Design
Hi-Fi Mockups
Rapid Prototyping
Tags
Joshua Vorbrich – Designer
Ardelle Ning – Designer
William Perez – Design Mentor
+ 1 Project Manager and 3 Developers
5 months (two 10 week terms) to design and develop
Takeaways
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Conducting user research and user interviews, synthesizing information into personas and user journey maps
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Developing relationships with professional partners, identifying their needs and coming up with solutions
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Designing user interfaces, ideating and iterating using industry best practices for wireframing, greyscales, and Hi-Fi mockups using Figma
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Collaborative design process, design reviews, user testing and implementing feedback
The Challenge
Our partners, a team of forestry researchers, came to DALI Lab with a problem. Every five years, they conduct a census of the forest, measuring the size, location, species etc. about every tree in the forest in order to track the forest growth and change. They were frustrated with their data collection process which was incredibly inefficient as it required the data collectors to reenter the data manually from the clipboards into the computer systems. Further, there were numerous parts of the data collection process in which field workers regularly made mistakes that were difficult to fix.
Pain Points
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Redundant data entry wastes time and creates room for mistakes
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Difficulties relying on field interns to correctly identify tree species
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Hard to identify and correct misidentified trees or mis recorded data
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Trouble navigating the forest and finding trees
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Lack of an easy and appealing way to share data with student groups on forest walks
The Product
InForest allows agroforestry researchers to more efficiently and accurately collect, track, and display data from forest censuses. The tablet application eliminates redundancies in the data collection and documentation process, increases the ease and accuracy of species identification, and flags potentially mislabeled trees. As a result, it greatly decreases both the amount of time required to conduct a forest census and the number of mistakes made in the censusing process.
User Research
We conducted user interviews of data collection field interns, our partners, and other forestry researchers before beginning to synthesize our responses into different user personas. We conducted industry research, identified the different contexts in which someone would be using our product in the field, developed user flows and journey maps to track the different stages that our product would be used in. Finally, we used point of view statements and How Might We (HMW) Questions to try to define our objectives.
How Might We streamline the data collection process and remove sources of error?
Initial Sketches – Crazy 8s
Each team member drew 8 sketches in 8 minutes as a design exercise
Through design reviews, critiques, and
continued conversations with our users, we were able to get user feedback on our designs, tighten our features, and continue iterating...
Greyscales and Initial Iterations
Style Guide
Final Screens
