I love plants, and was so excited to be the primary UX designer for the HerbUX Project, aiming to make herbarium data easily accessible to the public online. In this ambitious project I was tasked with creating a proposal for a new interface rebuilding the plant specimen discovery mechanism from the ground up.
UI Designer
UX Researcher
March 2021 - Present
Figma
User Interviews
Linked Open Data
Patrick Rasleigh
Rebecca Kartzinel, Ph.D.
Timothy Whitfeld, Ph.D.
Herbariums are physical collections of preserved plant specimens used for scientific study, representing a critical material history of ecological state and environmental change through time.
Herbarium specimens throughout the world have increasingly been digitized and made available online. The HerbUX project aims to design a prototype interface that increases access to these critical collections for non-expert audiences to be used in classrooms, museums, and other public spaces.
My team and I organized group interviews with three major subgroups– herbarium specialists, science educators, and museum specialists. I sent out a survey to our last subgroup, students, to collect over 400 responses from throughout Brown University and Providence, Rhode Island. From their responses we grouped common themes and identified the following painpoints:
Big words are intimidating
Scientific names can be confusing and completely unintelligible by people without specialized knowledge, making it difficult for them to search and read existing databases.
Lack of visual engagement
Visuals are integral for student engagement; educators pointed out the importance of working with specimen images rather than just spreadsheets of metadata.
Lack of personal investment
Without a professional investment, people rarely have reason to be interested in or to care enough about plants to want to know more about them and their history.
After weighing our priorities and synthesizing our research, we decided to focus specifically on the direct needs of our student audience, and how educators could utilize our interface to facilitate their learning.