This ongoing project is a social media app, (still in development) created in partnership with Ocean Alliance (http://www.whale.org/) that encourages users to contribute to crowd-sourced scientific research about whales, raise awareness about ocean conservation and raise funds for Ocean Alliance .
Based on interviews with the key stakeholders at Ocean Alliance, I started research into the most popular social media apps and platforms and compared those against the feature "wishlist".
A little more digging into the primary markets for this app lead me to a couple of primary channels: Whale Watches and Eco-Tourism.
As the app was also to serve as a way for Ocean Alliance to raise funds, I wanted to understand more about how and why people give. The net here was that folks are more likely to give if the recipient is specific, rather than a set of statistics; the results of giving are obvious and measurable; and Altruism in giving is a scale based on social metrics.
One of the exercises was to create a user profile and then to craft a story for how and why they might use the app's core features.
This is a mind map of what folks think of most when addressed with whales and conservancy. It helped define the statement of what the app should be 'best at' and how it differentiates itself from other social media apps - namely in contributing to research using image metadata the ability to make contributions from within the app.
Who doesn't love working with post-its to develop information architecture, work flows, and screen content?
Based on the sketches, I was able to pull together this Balsamiq mockup to test the workflow with folks, find holes and fill them, and eliminate some redundancies.
Balsamiq is pretty sketchy-looking (by design) so one must take some shots at what the actual screens would look like.
The style tile was based in part on existing logo work Ocean Alliance had done for their Kickstarter "Snotbot" project.
While I was tinkering with the Whale Snap logo based on the Snotbot stuff, I did some graphic explorations to overhaul the Ocean Alliance Logo for harmony and synergy. I just couldn't help myself.