The Raptors

We reached out to the Raptors for a process analysis project on communication, going through the whole design process we created a prototype that dealt with values and glance based communication within the facility.

Problem

How do we better evaluate health of animals through better interface choices?

Design Process

From our focus on communication we decided that we needed to do more fieldwork + research to better understand the frictions of the current system. In our analysis and workshops we developed a persona that would most likely fit within an employee at The Raptors

Through our further research we found frictions. We generally found that:

1. Detailed information is often “hidden in plain sight” making it hard to understand trends or history unless the issue was serious enough to warrant wading through books
2. Difficulty documenting and searching things up unless directly spoken to, leading to many trainers having missing gaps on specific birds unless the issue was serious enough to warrant an all hands meeting3) A poor communication system that relied too much on uncrystallized information, in other words nobody knew the full picture.

A hybrid method of communication also offers distinct advantages than having everything purely digital. It offers greater accessibility across trainers, and it allows trainers to quickly cross reference data and come to conclusions during preflight checks, allowing users to quickly move from one task to the next.

Persona Construction

To create our personas we looked at how people approached The Raptors. During our initial research we found 3 main archtypes of people that would catagorize the makeup internally.

We generally found that people that did work at The Raptors could be divided into 3 main archtypes:

1. New Trainers that are looking for ways to facilitate communciations based on their limited skill set.
2. Seasoned trainers who have worked with birds before and have knowledge with trainer communication and ecological systems.
3. Old hand managers that know the ins and outs of the program and procedures.

From this our rationale was to further develop a persona for seasoned trainers and managers reasoning that newer recruits could be better trained after the fact, but having seasoned biologists and managers help with teaching newer employees color coding and interaction systems would be of a greater benefit for overall stronger communication.

User Experience

Trainers have options upon arriving at the facility for site prep, upon entering the facility and commencing site prep trainers can visually estimate the behavior of the bird before prep through the round up sheets at the front of their enclosures. Bird behavior and bird weight are visualized here as “colored blocks” for the past week, allowing trainers to guess on future behaviors based on present patterns.

Our Intervention

Our proposal is to improve the communication of the trainers with a glance based communication system that would be mounted in the enclosure and paired with an app. Trainers would be better equipped to notice patterns in behavior or feeding that needed to be worked on before major flight at sites.

Exsisting Frameworks as Tacit Knowledge

To illustrate good and bad days we thought of 2 ways we could drive home glance-ability in our worksheets + application user interactions.

1. Using a traffic light system to highlight good and bad days and to describe the amount of food being fed.
2. Using arrows to reinforce weight gain and loss of birds that fly at multiple facilities around metro-vancouver.

We felt an exsisting framework provided a clearer way to allow trainers to view past behaviors and flight assignments at a glance without too much cognitive overhead, allowing trainers to be easily onboarded through the system, reducing training costs.

Final Exploration

Our final exploration centered around a hybridized design to faciliate communication for trainers across facilities. We used a prototyping service to design a new interaction that could be maintained across multiple facilities through asynchronous data management

You can view the prototype here.