RINO App: A Zoo Admin's Assistant
[Regulator of Information and Navigable Operations]
![Image displays an Android phone](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6006f4fb05a6bad348debe94/6042879898eb49e63b7cde2a_Adnroidpng.png)
Summary
A friend of mine from college created the education department for Racine Zoo in Wisconsin from the ground up. They have 16+ programs dedicated to conservation and animal education on top of other events at the zoo. For the last five years, she’s been working with common tools like Outlook, Gmail, and Excel with little success in finding a program that can accurately consolidate many of the tasks that entail staffing for animal care.
The Problem to Solve
Needing to jump through various applications for animal handling creates a large margin of potentially dangerous errors! While Microsoft Excel and Outlook have their functions in the zoo administrator's life, they are not a consolidated substitute for what the client was looking for.
App Requirements
The app was required to solve three major tasks, which included the ability to:
-Plug in animal information and rules associated with them (including rules about how long animals can be out)
-Plug in educators as they’re clear to handle specific animals
-Generate a list of suggested animals for events based on the above parameters
Target Audience
With emerging young, educated professionals in the zoological field, the RINO app helps serve as an organizer for driven coordinators. These diligent workers are the bridge between conservation education and internal cooperation. They deserve to have an app that works according to their needs.
RESEARCH PHASE
Market Analysis
While trying to research apps to help with animal handling, it became very clear right away that this was a novel problem to solve. When speaking with my client, she had mentioned that no such app existed in the field. In an attempt to figure out what features worked and were valued, I conducted an interview while writing down the pros and cons of the programs that were currently used at Racine Zoo.
![A comparative chart between Microsoft Excel and Outlook.
Pros for Organization text "Excel allows you to create tables and charts that are easy visuals to follow. it is an application that is well-established in a variety of professional settings.
Versatility text under Outlook.
"Outlook includes internal messaging on top of the ability to create events. Like Excel, Outlook is an established application used across industries.
Learning Curve Under Excel as a con
Currently the program is mainly used as a mean to organize staff and their certifications, but there aren't other functions that work well with needs
Too Many Under Outlook
While outlook is used for events and messaging, staff still need to use external notes and emails to collect all information needed for schedules.
Inspiration under Excel
Organizing using tabs will allow for easy navigation and lists can help display info easily.
Calendar under Outlook
We can utilize a calendar that will include events with suggested animals and staffing.](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6006f4fb05a6bad348debe94/604314eb52a35a218dd9ae86_market.PNG)
"Having to use multiple platforms drastically increases the chance for errors...I just really want things to work and work in a timely manner..."
Conducting a survey while asking both quantitative and qualitative questions, revealed what our client valued most.
Who valued most from a streamlined process?
How long on average does it take to submit a staffing form?
What is most important to consider when working for the zoo?
Our client informed us that it goes through at least five iterations of confirmation between different department heads before the schedule is finally posted (and they each have to deal with their own personal programs)!
![A word cloud created from survey answers of the client. Prominent words include animal, educators, schedules, job, mistakes, make, ambassador.](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6006f4fb05a6bad348debe94/604317c9d6d9ed4c9551d2e8_cloud.PNG)
Creating a word cloud from our interview notes revealed the key words that our client would use to describe their position and what they wanted for the staff! Animals and Educators were no surprise, but seeing words like Mistakes, Order, and Rules really drove home that they needed something that WORKED.
EMPATHIZING WITH THE USER
Persona 1: Aszya (27yo || B.S. Zoology)
leads the education department with compassion and consideration for the safety of staff, guests, and animals. She prioritizes accessible education and making sure that staffing needs consistently and accurately reflect the needs of the zoo.
Pain points: Too many apps, simple tasks fail too readily, currently no way to auto-generate suggestions
Persona 2: Ryan (29yo || B.S. Animal Conservation)
is an Education Lead who focuses on the daily face-to-face interactions between staff, animals, and the guests. With a degree in Animal Conservation, he values teaching others about the importance of biodiversity and conservation efforts of zoos.
Pain points: communication issues between departments, outdated information can lead to safety issues, need for quick and accurate updates isn't readily available with current systems
Journey Mapping
What steps do our audience need to take to complete the task of organizing their events and animal handlers? Through our empathy map and storyboarding, we strip the path to its simplest form to focus on keeping the process succinct but effective.
![This is a Journey Map that shows Aszya's routine in staffing for an event.](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6006f4fb05a6bad348debe94/6043269ff82f3d7491dd3036_empathy%20map.png)
Simple User Flow and Storyboarding
A great way to break down the steps needed to make the app a positive experience for our client. It was crucial to make sure that information was easily accessible in the least amount of steps and laid out intuitively.
THE DESIGN PROCESS
Sketches and Notes
There were many ways to approach designing RINO. What better way than to sketch and take notes quickly throughout the ideation phase. This was a great opportunity to focus on the what and the how of the app. Some major hurdles I wanted to tackle were how to easily categorize information in an effective but simple way and the presentation of the overall app to include all the details the client wanted.
Crazy 8’s
I wanted to use tags as the easiest and most navigable process, because it is intuitive and customizable based on the user's needs. I iterated the main events page of the app several times, and found that having the tags system helped solve the issue of creating unique rules for animals, suggestions, and event needs.
![A sheet of plain computer paper folded into eights. Each section shows a variation on how to the main event page of the app would be laid out.](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6006f4fb05a6bad348debe94/604234595ce3e1bd04ae4a67_crazy%208%201.jpg)
Hand-drawn Paper Prototype
With limited time during a sprint, it's imperative to get ideas out quickly and efficiently! For the design, I made a small booklet that helped mimic the tabs of the app. It aided in visualizing what would would be displayed up front, and the backside of each tab would have a small sketch of how other screens may appear.
Mood Board and Color
During the paper prototyping process, I wanted to give consideration for colors and moods of the app. It should feel fresh and lively like the animals and plants you would see at the zoo. The colors were meant to evoke a very natural and refreshing feeling for our users. While the not all of the colors were used in the design, I kept the greens and lighter oranges/yellows to make the palette more inviting!
![The mood board consists of 6 images total. Starting at the left, upper row is an image of orange bunches on their branches. Going right, we have color shade e59a68 which is a muted orange color. There is a potted monstera plant against a white background as the last image on the top row.
The second row starting left has 4 colors of a dark green, a lighter, leafy green, pale green, and pale gold stripes going horizontally.
The middle picture depicts water bromeliads of a light orange and yellow variety. The last image is of color #293818, a dark, earthy green tone.](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6006f4fb05a6bad348debe94/6042971d3f69fcb343b796bb_mood.png)
Wireframes
After creating so many paper sketches, it was time to gather the best ideas into InVision. It allowed me to look at functionality and flow before moving forward with prototyping.
Clickable Low Fidelity Prototype
This shows the interactions in practice! What changes can be made to the interface for better user experience? I touched up the main features while improving assets to make sure they were accessible and consistent with our vision for RINO.
Link to Prototype. Final Thoughts
With limited time and resources, I spent a great deal of time with my client in discussing how the internal systems of RINO could be improved. Overall, she was very pleased with the app's simple and functional design! The hope is to go through several new iterations of development and testing to gather more feedback in the future. Currently, I have been working on creating a better visual design as can be seen by the slides below.
![](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6006f4fb05a6bad348debe94/606511dc255053a3ee6e85b7_Play%20(2).png)