Monterey Bay Aquarium [Mobile App]

The Monterey Bay Aquarium is a large non profit aquarium located in Monterey, California. With a team I designed an app to help them engage with their visitors as well as potential visitors who cannot currently visit thanks to Covid-19.

Background information

About Monterey Bay Aquarium

• Aquarium located in Monterey, California

• Nonprofit public aquarium

• Regional focus on marine habitats of Monterey bay

• Research and conservation efforts

• Sustainability

Monterey Bay Aquarium's Values

About the Project

The Team

• The team was comprised of 4 young UX generalists

The Timeline

• We scheduled this project for a 2 week sprint

The Problem

• Due to the Covid 19 pandemic the aquarium is currently closed to visitors with no confirmed reopening date

• The aquarium would like

Target Devices

• Native mobile application

• Tablet Application

Target Users

• Teens

• School teachers

• Animal lover

Discovery

The Current website

Business Analysis

Our team began by doing a deep dive into the current resources offered by the Monterrey Bay aquarium. We discovered that currently there is a website and 3 apps. None of the apps accomplish what we set out on the project to do, but we found the site had a lot of features that seemed useful for the app.

Current Information architecture

Comparative and competitive analysis

We then in a group compiled a list of features that would be most common across the kind of app we were planning and therefore wanted to focus on. We performed a comparative and competitive analysis on other apps similar to the one we were creating in order to analyze what the most common features were.

Define

User Interviews

From there we performed interviews with 6 participants whom had been to an aquarium at least once in their lives.

Interview questions

GENERAL

1. Have you been to  Monterey Bay Aquarium in the last 10 years?

   1. If no, have you been to an Aquarium in last few years?

   2. If no, have you been to a Museum / Zoo?

2. Why did you choose to go to the Aquarium?

3. How frequently do you visit?

4. How do you engage with the aquarium outside of operating hours?

EDUCATION

1. How did you feel about the educational resources?

2. What did you learn from your visit?

3. What did you learn about conservation/sustainability?

OVERALL EXPERIENCE

1. How did you feel about your experience?

2. What was memorable about your experience?

3. How do you interact with the exhibits once inside the aquarium?

4. How do you explore/navigate aquariums?

Affinity Map

From these interviews we created an affinity map to sort the responses of our subjects into categories

Personas

We determined that there were 3 main kinds of users we wanted to target for the app- A Teacher, A Student, and an Animal Lover. Using our user interview data we created personas for each of these target users

I was in charge specifically of making the persona for Rowan, the animal lover.

Problem and Solution Statements

We then narrowed the problem down for each of these target users to help figure out what we wanted to focus on

Feature Analysis

We then compiled a list of features we thought based on the data and keeping our target users in mind would be most useful to include in the app and sorted them based on amount of effort as well as amount of impact in order to help us narrow in on features to focus on

 Design

Preliminary Sketches

Once we felt we had a good idea of what we wanted to make we were ready to begin designing the app. We wanted to make it available across different types of mobile phones as well as make it available for tablet, but decided to focus on iPhone initially.

We decided to spread out to make simple preliminary sketches. I chose to do mine via sketch and had a little too much fun with it, leading mine to be a bit higher fidelity than intended, but it turned out to be useful later.

Low Fi Prototypes

We looked across all the paper sketches and compared them to find which features we wanted to keep and change from each of them.

We decided to divide the app into 3 main categories- My Visit, Fun, and Learning. My visit comprised of the map and the calendar. Fun comprised of the livecam and games. Learning comprised of an A-Z list of animals and information on conservatin

We designed those main categories pages for the main tab and then came back together to collaborate on a homepage and onboarding. I was in charge of the my visit page and in combining them to look cohesive.

Information Architecture

At this stage we also performed a tree test to determine how intuitive our categorizations were. We found that the task users had the most difficulty navigating successfully was adding an activity to the schedule. The results of the question on the schedule is shown below

Usability Testing

We then performed usability tests on our clickable prototype.

Style Guide

We determined a style guide together for how we wanted the app to look, picking colors and fonts to match the website

High Fi Prototype

After discussing and determining all of this we were ready to transform our low fidelity prototype into a high fidelity prototype. For this the team member who did not get to work on the low fi prototype made it with consultation from us on design decisions.

Preliminary Sketch Tablet version

While the Hi fi version was being created, the rest of us decided to discuss the tablet version a bit. We realized that my initial sketch was very well suited for a tablet version of the app but with a few small adjustments. We ended up just having me convert my original designs into the same format as our low fi prototype and into tablet but discussed next steps for how to best to turn it into a tablet version.

Next steps

As we wrapped up the 2 week sprint we found ourselves happy with what we came up with, but yet knowing there was more we could do.

• Tablet format creation and testing

• Development of gamification and rewards as well as the fun facts feature

• Improve functionality and interaction of 2D Map and expand 3D map view

• add more interactivity to the live cam

• Further information architecture improvements and testing

• expand educational offerings and courses