Woodland Park Zoo
The Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, Washington gives out grants for projects that involve generating empathy towards animal conservation. My student team took this on as an assignment during my time at the University of Washington. We asked ourselves, how might we generate empathy for animals in a target demographic of 12- to 25-year-olds?
Our Solution
A web comic that tells the story of Gunnar, a hawk at the zoo.
My Position
Primary user researcher and UX/UI designer
I was responsible for conducting user research, synthesizing data, and creating high fidelity mock ups on a team of six people.
Process
Because the directive from the zoo was kind of vague we set out to clarify the problem by conducting stakeholder interviews, surveying people in the target audience, and researching empathy best practices. I assembled surveys that were distributed to the target audience.
The zoo mentioned that while children under twelve are their primary visitors. The zoo wanted to reach everyone and that children over the age of 12 generally lost interesting in animals and going to the zoo and we identified these people over the age of 12 as a potential target audience.
We researched empathy best practices established by Woodland Park Zoo and discovered that the best way to generate empathy in an audience is to tell a story. This influenced our decision to tell the story of Gunnar, one of the ambassador animals at the zoo.
When analyzing competitors we found that often times people who attempted to generate empathy for animals ended up generating sympathy instead, such as Sarah McLachlan's animal cruelty videos. We found that this method often neglected to include animals that typically don't convey emotions similar to humans such as birds or fish.
Creating personas
We developed two personas from our user research data. Our primary audience was teenagers whom we found were very passionate about the environment and animal conservation. Our secondary audience would be people in their early 20's who are generally busier and less social than people in their teens but still just as passionate about environmental preservation and animal conservation. We felt like these two audiences would resonate well with an empathic story of an animal.
I created the user the flow based on user research, which I worked with another UX designer in the group to translate into wireframes.
Testing Results
During usability testing we found that people didn't understand how to navigate through the interface. This led us to adding arrows to guide the user through the story.
Prototyping
