Needs Analysis

Guiding Questions

What problem are we proposing to solve?

When looking for inspiration in systemic problems, our group happened across a troubling statistic:

“The average American child can recognize 1,000 corporate logos but can't identify 10 plants or animals native to his or her own region.”

This study was originally cited in a 2005 book, “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder”, by Richard Louv. This, even without the attention grabbing statistic (And there’s more where that came from! See below), is representative of a greater problem. If the average American child’s relationship with nature was so dire back in 2005, the situation now must have escalated (We all know that our cultural relationships with both technology and the world around us have not improved) - Not to mention that those children from almost twenty years ago are now no longer children! This is a problem faced by children and adults alike, and one where the individual’s desire for a solution is not itself a solution: Disconnect from nature isn’t easy to remedy when the average American doesn’t even have the knowledge to know what to begin learning. Another cautionary anecdote from “Last Child in the Woods” cements this idea:

“Children in the USA average just 30 minutes a week of unregulated time outdoors; however, their weekly electronic media exposure is almost 45 hours a week.”

We want to help individuals connect more with nature. We want to create a space that helps adults and children to overcome the barrier of entry to something as fundamentally human as the outdoors - And to allow knowledgeable, passionate people to educate others on identifying native plants and connecting them to other learners and educators.

Who matters?

We developed several informed personas based on the interviews we conducted and various discussion boards.

One group we have a particular focus on is parents of young children, young adults, and kids. We think that it’s important to educate younger people as they have a lifetime of impact on their ecosystem ahead of them. We hope to shape their knowledge and experience with their surroundings.

Another relevant group to this issue is the generation that has already been separated from nature in their childhood and grew into a group of adults that long for a connection to the natural world. These people have a desire to learn more, but do not have the innate familiarity with the outdoors that people who grew up without the addictive grip of technology would have had.

How do our prospective users think about this problem/activity?

Children don’t always have the awareness to know what aspects of nature are good for them, and what parts of their development that they may not be able to engage with if they don’t spend time outside. They operate more on instinct than adults do, and tend to trend towards engaging with “fun” things, with some kind of built-in reward that might not necessarily naturally occur without a mature outlook on knowledge-gathering.

On the other hand, adults that desire this connection with nature more thoughtfully would want a way to enter into the space of discussing the outdoors without feeling judgment, without any assumption of prior knowledge, and with a high capacity for growth as their horizons increase with the growing amount of information they know about their environment.

Most responders to our surveys indicated that when they want to identify a plant in the wild, they had to do several searches, either image or textual, to refine their search. This is a sticking point, and prevents people from gathering more knowledge because of a process that could be refined.

What requirements must your solution satisfy? (think about different stakeholders)

Requirements we identified for the general user group include:

• Provides a comprehensive level of information
• Low barrier of entry for those new to plants
• No continuous interaction required so as not to interrupt the users' connection with nature

Additionally, for children (and for adults who may benefit from an extrinsic reward system), we wanted to implement some kind of collection/reward scheme for the app, “gamifying” the users’ collection of knowledge about plants or of their plant sightings.

What will the impact of a successful solution be?

A successful solution would provide a quick and easy way for people of all levels to share information and learn new information about different plants. It will make collecting and learning about plants a new and exciting experience again. The users’ interaction with the intended system would vary for each type of user, but their journeys, both through and before/after, are represented in these journey maps, utilizing the structure of the personas shown earlier:

Are there limitations to this idea?

Of course! One of the biggest struggles we are anticipating is how to balance a community board with individual senses of rewards: Can you allow some people to make their progress public and “braggable” without making other people feel bad for not progressing as quickly or as far? The natural world carries with it a cultural undercurrent of unstated ethical “good” or “bad”, with people that know more having an association with a moral good. Obviously, knowing more about plants doesn’t actually make you a better person, but there’s a sense of depth to the superiority (that isn’t there for knowledge about cars, for instance) that people may feel that should be accounted for.

Another obvious complication is that we are attempting to design a software-based solution for a guiding problem that can partially boil down to “people spend too much time on their phones”. We will have to be very mindful in the design process to not fall into the trap of designing for ourselves or for the success of our app, but instead to concentrate on designing for our users, making what we can provide as much of a useful tool as we can, without adding a potential extra burden.

Our Interviews

The Process:

Over the course of a week, we talked to people in our close community and adventures out to Boston to interact with those interested by a poster created by our team. When people came up to our poster they could scan a QR code to answer some follow-up questions. We had 12 people we were able to interview through our poster in Boston. Additionally, we were able to contact others in our area outside of Boston. Through our interviews, we extended the invitation to conduct deeper co-designs of a more developed product.

The Results:

We got an overwhelmingly positive response and everyone we talked to said that they had little knowledge on plants but would like to learn more. People made interesting and conflicting points on gamification as some people said it would help them interact more while others had concerns that if it was too gamey people would not take the information seriously. We definitely will work on creating a balance with this dissonance.

Raw(er) Data: