A User-Journey in Citizen Science Apps

For Citizen Science projects, it is essential to understand the needs of the user and how to design interactive products and apps to guarantee good usability – which is highly involving. Researching and observing should be an experience with added value. Therefore User Journeys are often used in the progress of developing a new Application. 

The term "user journey" is part of the "user-centred-design" and wants do understand the "user's goal", their motivations and current pain points. These questions serve as the base for visualizing user requirements and help in terms of interface design for your specific application. Because first of all, a well-designed Citizen Science App should be easy-to-use and give positive feedback to the users - while they contribute to a better understanding of our world and improve scientific data-quality. 

The following motivation- and community-features have positive affects on the User-Experience and help to increase the scope, as well as the quality of the entire project:

1. How-to Citizen Science

The app-intro is an introductory welcome message for all citizen science beginners. It's the first step of the whole user-experience and explains the handling of the Citizen Science Smartphone App. The start of a discovery-journey. In the case you want to foreground an aspect of your research project, we will gladly implement individually designed Intro-Slides – for a lasting first impression. 

2. Enter a dialogue with the user

The centrepiece of the SPOTTERON Citizen Science Apps is the App-Spot-Dialog. Visually matching your project, it leads the user to their first spot – their first scientific observation. The dialogue is hierarchically structured and consists of different types of selection-fields. Icon- and picture-based buttons enhance the usability and help display complex data in a simplified way. For every Citizen Science Project, we conceptualize the Add-Spot-Dialog in collaboration with our partners.

More about spots & observations

3. Motivate

A successful Citizen Science Project lives from the long-term motivation of the users. To reward them on their expedition, all Apps on the SPOTTERON Platform include features, such as badges, user-ranking and spot-collection. 

 More about the User-Motivation-Pack

4. Social-Community-Building

What would a Citizen Science App be without an active community? In the end, the citizen scientist wants to share discoveries, follow other people's observations and be part of a vibrant community. We developed a range of Community-Features, which are included in all SPOTTERON Citizen Science Apps. We are continually developing new features in collaboration with our partners to improve the user's experience and to provide them for every running project on the SPOTTERON Platform. 

 More about the Community-Pack

We're here to help.

User-Journeys and User-Experience are practical analysis- and design-tools to determine the vision of your research-project and ease the entrance into the world of Citizen Science. Here at SPOTTERON we are happy to assist you. Contact us here!