salt.ai: New Product Design
An AI Whale Identification and Education iOS Mobile Application for Whale Enthusiasts and Researchers
What's in Store
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Problem Space
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How Can I Help?
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Understanding Our Target Audiences
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Branding & UI Design
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Next Steps
Original illustration by me, Danielle Martin, for WDC social media and merchandise
What's the Issue?
Whale enthusiasts don't have access to the big catalog of all the North Atlantic Humpback Whales, and they wish they could closely follow and easily find pictures of their favorite whales.
How might I help whale enthusiasts access reliable information about their favorite whales?
Marine biologists who research whales through identification and behavior observations can spend hours just identifying a single whale from their trip.
How might I help marine biologists save time and avoid human errors when identifying whales?
How Can I Help?
Analyze target audiences to understand potential users.
Consult with professional marine biologist and whale enthusiasts about their goals, current resources, & behaviors.
Design UI of the alpha-stage iOS mobile application.
Understanding Our Target Audiences
To start, I wanted to understand who the target audiences were, and what they want and need to accomplish their goals with their whale research.
Essentially, I brainstormed who I was creating for and why. Then, I interviewed people who aligned with this criteria.
To better understand my users, I focused on 4 major questions about the target audience:
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What are their demographics?
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What technologies
do they use?
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What are their lifestyles like?
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What are their current research behaviors?
After interviewing relevant users, we were able to meet our personas, Molly and Noah:
Click image to enlarge
Click image to enlarge
UI Design
After learning about our users and our competitors, I dove into branding ideation and UI designing.
I created my own UI library and design system for the new product.
Mood Board
I wanted the overall mood of this product to represent and capture the essence of the Gulf of Maine's nautical and minimal aesthetics, and to have a sole focus of humpback whales.
I accomplished this through displaying imagery that captures all of this through:
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Using only the navy and aqua colors found in the water of the Gulf of Maine.
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Nautical feel, from typography to GPS and mapping.
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Featuring only humpback whales.
Click image to enlarge
Style Tile
Using the mood board to drive the brand aesthetic, I made sure to include and utilize:
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Aqua as the main actionable color.
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White for icons and the primary background.
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Teal, Mist, and sand for backgrounds other than white.
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Black for primary text.
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Authentic images of the identified whales.
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Stellwagen Bank's map with the correct licensing.
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Fun UX Copy for loading process of identifying a whale - "Coming up for air..."
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Font styles that combine the old-school nautical feeling and accessible reading for all users.
Click image to enlarge
High-Fidelity Mockups
In these designs and prototype, users can:
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View their previously-saved "Favorite" Whales
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See which whales have been sighted recently
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Scroll through the entire Gulf of Main Humpback Whale catalog
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See Fun Facts about each whale
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Use AI that is knowledgable of all whales in the catalog to identify a whale by uploading a photo.
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Have the whale identification result give you a percentage of how likely accurate the matching of the image and the whale is.
Next Steps
The main next step for this project is to consult with salt.ai's competitors for interest in collaboration or partnership at some capacity to ensure public whale knowledge for the benefit of our users and for more transparency on environmental health statuses.
salt.ai would be a great addition to its competitors' existing services and products. Teaming up with any of them would be even greater for users since they already trust and use them for research purposes.
However, if that is not what's in store for salt.ai, then salt.ai will continue to market, design, and test with its target audience to ensure credibility, trust, and reliability.