My team of two other designers and I worked on EarthRabbit, a collaborative conservation mobile app, and pitched it to stakeholders in a hypothetical meeting with the outdoor recreation co-op REI. We designed the app based primarily on interviews with self-identified nature lovers after uncovering their pain points in the form of fear of unknowns in nature, anxiety about the state of the environment, and helplessness in not knowing how to help conservation efforts outside of monetary donations.

Additionally, while the majority of users understood the benefits of spending time in nature, they told us they often lack the time and motivation to do so. As such, despite feeling “awe and fascination” in nature, to quote one interviewee, respondents as a whole did not find being in nature to be a priority on their long and varied to-do list.

To align EarthRabbit with REI as a business, we also created a competitive business matrix to see where the co-op stands amongst similar outdoor recreation retailers. We additionally conducted feature analyses of a) outdoor identification apps and b) GIS-based apps to understand which features would best address the pain points mentioned above. Finally, using Google’s HEART framework, we also defined a rubric of objectives and key results to measure EarthRabbit’s success in solving these problems.

With our research findings, we created the three features we based EarthRabbit around: