Assignment 1: Project Proposal

Project Proposal: iNaturalist.org

(Ten-character: Naturalist)

I213 User Interface Design and Development

Prof. Marti Hearst

 

Project Members

Nate Agrin

¨        web-based programming / API design / service design

¨        experience with design software

¨        minimal prototyping experience

 

Jessica Kline

¨        writing/editing

¨        liberal arts background (coursework in the evolutionary history of living organisms)

¨        enrolled in UI tools course

 

Andrew McDiarmid

¨        writing/editing

¨        experience with design software

¨        XML, XSLT; rudimentary HTML, CSS

¨        critical aesthetic sense (art history background)

 

Ken-ichi Ueda

¨        web-based programming (PHP/Python/relational databases)

¨        graphic design for the web

¨        domain expertise (professional and academic biology background, avid amateur naturalist)

 

Problem Statement

iNaturalist.org is a proposed online community for people interested in the natural world.  It serves three purposes: providing software tools for recording information about nature, sharing that and other sources of natural history information, and facilitating communication between naturalists.  For this project, we have chosen to develop the interface for submitting observations about objects in nature, specifically, living things.  This involves three kinds of data: the identity of the organism, the time of the observation, and the location of the observation.  We have chosen to focus on the location-selection interface.  This is not as simple as selecting a point on a map, because an amateur naturalist may wish to identify location by a named place, or by creating and naming his or her own area on a map.  Identifying and selecting the species observed is another interface challenge we will broach in this project, but our primary efforts will be directed toward the spatial problem.

 

Characteristics of Primary Users and Goals

The primary users within the scope of this project will be naturalists wishing to log and share their sightings of specific organisms.  Goals include the logging the what, where, and when of a sighting, creating a personal history of such findings, communicating these findings with other users, as well as uploading digital photos.

 

Potential interfaces to build

¨        map interface to add location and time of observations

¨        taxonomic selection interface to specify the observed organism

 

Potential interfaces/capabilities to defer

¨        map interface for visualizing / searching data

¨        digital photo upload capability

¨        user communication/discussion capability

 

Future users, which were determined to be out of scope for this project, include novice users wishing to identify, via browsing or threaded discussion, something they’ve found through their own nature experiences, and researchers wishing to use and search the data provided by primary users.

 

How to Find Participants

We have decided to target local, active naturalist groups including the Golden Gate Audubon Society and the PierFishing.com community.  These groups both represent potentially large groups of users who will be able to give us valuable feedback on our proposed interface.  Each group embodies different needs and different concerns.  It is hoped that by using each group’s prior knowledge, we may meet the needs of various naturalist communities, and in the future be able to extrapolate these needs into features for use by other naturalist groups.  We recognize that these groups may not be readily accessible at all stages of development of this project.  If this happens, we intend to solicit the opinion and expertise of researchers in the department of biology.  This highlights a potential secondary use for iNaturalist.org, namely a researcher interface, or API that allows raw data to be extracted from the application and used by biodiversity researchers.

 

Concerns

Privacy is a major concern in this project.  Users may wish to control who can see their data, and for locations, how geographically precise their data should be displayed.  For instance, a mushroom forager might want to reveal his favorite chanterelle spot to his close friends, but he might also wish promote awareness of local mushrooms by alerting the community to their presence.  Privacy for the organisms themselves is also a concern.  Revealing the precise locations of special-status species puts them at risk of overexposure or, at worst, poaching.  To meet the privacy needs both of observers and the observed, our interface will need to allow users to control what other users can see their data and with what degree of geographic precision they should be displayed.  It should also provide the same geographic precision reduction to hide endangered and special-status species from all users but the individuals who observed them.  While we could simply hide all observations of special-status species, notifying local community members that there are threatened organisms in their neighborhood could actually boost local awareness and support conservation efforts.