Preserve

Overview:

Preserve is a project I created independently,  inspired by my love for nature reserves and animals. As someone who only recently began visiting nature reserves as a place to relax during stressful times in university, I wanted to design an app that could encourage other students to visit them too.

The app gives directions to local nature reserves, information about activities and accessibility features to the nature reserves, identification of wildlife, and collectible digital stickers for achievements in the app.


Strategy:

Just before starting this project I had discovered User Experience and User Interface design; I had been reading a lot of books and articles about UX. I wanted to incorporate some of the UX process into this project so that I could better understand the user needs, improve my design skills and make something that could be realistically useful.

At the beginning of the project, I conducted a lot of research into nature reserves, gamification of apps, and UI/UX design. I also conducted some primary research, visiting all of the nature reserves in the area and photographing the wildlife and signage. Unfortunately, people had been fly-tipping at one of the nature reserves I visited. I wanted the app to also encourage people to volunteer and help out with the maintenance of the wildlife.

Next, I conducted a survey on some target users in order to understand what they would want from a nature app. I found that most of the participants were interested in learning about the environment and visiting nature reserves. The target users also suggested some features that they would find useful, such as animal identification and directions to the nature reserves, which helped me to determine the features and flow of the app.

From this, I came up with imaginary personas to represent the users of my app concept, and to help picture an easy user experience of the app. These were all steps I hadn’t tried before, but found very useful and ended up adopting these techniques as a regular stage in my design process.

Here is the moodboard I created after I had defined my project’s aims and target audience. I selected type, icons, UI, illustration and my own photography that were inspiration for my app’s design

Development:

Once the flow of the app had been explored, I started designing a wireframe in Adobe XD. At this stage, only basic rectangles show where the content will go.



At the same time, I was designing the brand identity for the project, which needed to fit my target audience of students. I took inspiration from apps such as Pokemon Go, which also included a game aspect and illustrations.

After I had started adding the content, I conducted some user feedback with potential target users of the app. This was incredibly helpful for understanding the positives and negatives of the design, and it was necessary to ask them questions about what changes they would like to see.

Deliverables:

After several rounds of user feedback I finalised my app UI design, along with illustrative sticker designs to promote the project. It was a fun project to work on, especially since it was an app that I would want to use.