BUTTERFLY COLLECTOR: Everyone can identify butterflies now!
A project by group 4 based on Helmotz case
A fun way to learn about your enviorement!
Making the butterfly identification esasier and more accesible than ever.
How do people identify butterflies currently?
Counting butterflies is fun! You may count butteflies almost everywhere and at any time you want, not only on your local places but also on trips and remote places.
In order to identify butterflies, one of the most common strategies consists on register all the butterflies on a small area arround you, a 5x5x5m cube. This way you can get a lot of different butterflies and info about more rare species with unique behaviour and comunities on remote places. In order to go counting, you need to bring some specific tools; a butterfly net, observation jar, field guide and a field sheet or App.
Our main goal is making this procces suitable for non experts by giving them a less complex working enviorement, having a same app for taking pictures, identifiying the species, learn about them and uploading the data so scientist could get acces to these new encounters.
This way, every one will be able to go outside and have some fun while learning about the wildlife.
The Helmotz case
Helmotz currently counts with a website in wich you can learn about a lot of butterflies, via their data base divided on species or for the non flutter experts, throught a cuestionary made only with images and showing their name and main traits under. You can also register any butterfly encounter on their website once you register.
Our main problem with this, its how it is designed. we really liked the idea of having a way to identify the butterflies by their main traits, that rookies and newbies might be able to slowly learn how to recognice them and gain some expertice with tie and practise, in order to identify them by their names on a later stage.
In order to get some actual users out of the scholars to use this kind of service, it needs to be easy to use and self explinatory, as the casual user will want something it can just be downloaded on your phone or oppened on your browser in order to start going. Our main focus will be identifiying the butterflies throught binary search, similarly to what helmotz has on their website, but with some major improvements.
On helmotz website, we currently can access to a free butterfly identication engine, which gives us two images of butterflies with their names and some of the most noticeable traits and you have to choose whick loocks more similar to the one you actually saw. After a while, the website finally stops giving you more choices and proceeds to explain more about the last specie you choosed. https://web.app.ufz.de/tagfalter-monitoring/species_catalog/determination_board
OUR APP and WEBSITE
In order to make this procces easier and faster, we are going to add some questions about the butterfly you saw or took the picture of, we will start asking some easier questions like their color, wing shape and you have to press the option that fitted the most or leave it blank, this way the list of possible options on the bottom of the screen will get smaller faster untill you see the portrait of the one you were looking for.
The main freatures our app has its the capacity to identify and report the butterfly without the need to use any other device or tool, aswell as camera function and data about the butterflies species.We only require you to sign in with your email or similar, in order to avoid bots reporting butterflies on mass leading to missinformation and getting acces to your date and location, but only whenever its required to upload an encounter.
The app and the website currently have implemented the log in ssistem, as well as the collection tab, where you may see which species you have already interacted with, the database where you can check the data about the different species and the option to add an encounter with a butterfly and the community tab where you can see the post of other people.
What could be implemented for the final product?
The next thing to work on would be improving the UI and getting an actual way to report the report with a butterfly, with that the app would be a shippable product, but in order to have a place in the market there are many other things that are needed in order to attract the users. Some of our ideas are:
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Priced butterflies picture contests
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Functional archivement tab
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Expert mode where you can review the others pictures in order to identify the species.
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Organice butterflies counting events
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User gets feedback if its report gets validated
About Us
We are group 4 of the 2024 hackathon in hamburg, Raphael, Johanna, Jan, Miguel Ángel, José, Veronika & ZHI KAI. This is a two-week international workshop that brings together students from ITECH in Hamburg, I.E.S. La Fuensanta in Spain, MCUT in Taiwan, and RASEKO in Finland. Hosted in Hamburg.
The thinking procces
We were given three interesting projects to work on: Soundscape, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, and the Hamburg Harbour Museum.
After a firt draft seeing the Holmotz and Harbour museum, which were their main problems and how they could be solved, we decided to work on Helmotz.
The first steps consisted on using the skills learned previously on the workshop in order to get an idea and a plan on how to design our solution, we also had the pleasure to share our ideas with Michael Voight, involved with Helmotz.
After deciding that our product would be delivered in order to attract some casual user, like young people or other kinds of nature enthusiasts, we focused on gamification; rewarding the user for doing something. In this case taking butterflies and reporting them, in order to get more info about them, having a collection tab wich grows with every specimen and incentives to go for some different species.
We had to investigate about who would be our main customers and how do other mobile apps of this kind to get an audience.
Our Personas
Target Group Profile: Eco-Conscious Explorers
🎯 Name: Chris
👨💻 Age: 42
💼 Occupation: Lawyer
🚴♂️ Interest: Outdoors activities, having time off the desk and seeing beutiful places while walking her dog.
🌿 Personality: Curious, Analytical, Environmentally Aware
🌍 Goals:
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Outdoor Exploration: Balancing a desk job, Chris aims to spend more time outdoors and leanr about her enviorement
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Getting to use the identifiying tools: The current website and aps are unclear and hard to use, yet hasnt given up on learning about her enviorement.
Target Group Profile: New and less experienced user
🎯 Name: Max
👨💻 Age: 12
💼 Occupation: Student (year 6)
🚴♂️ Interest: Wants to learn more about nature but struggles identifiying butterflies
🌿 Personality: Curious, hiperactive, loves staying outside
🌍 Goals:
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Having fun on his walks with his parents: Max really enjoys staying at the park or the forest near his home, but since his parents dont let him go there alone, they accompany him, he wants sto have something to look for as his parents are sooo boring.
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Guides easier to use: Max is still young for uploading encounters to
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Outdoor Exploration: He really loves the wild, learning about everithing living arround him amazes him
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Getting to use the identifiying tools: The current website and aps are unclear and hard to use, yet hasnt given up on learning about her enviorement.
