During the pandemic, more people than ever flocked to nature as a way to safely escape lock-down. Birdwatching soared in popularity. Suddenly, the Lab had millions of users downloading their apps.

Strategic Vision

The Lab asked me to lead an effort to envision a next-generation mobile experience that could harness this movement and grow their audience through stronger engagement and retention—reducing churn and allowing the Lab to activate a much larger user base. Scaling their audience is a primary goal toward reversing the decline of billions of disappearing bird species in the world.

We used Notion to capture ideas from group brainstorming sessions.

Bring birds to the mainstream

The Lab had already transformed thousands of hard-core birders into a global movement of citizen scientists. But, their new mobile audience was mainly casual nature buffs who were satisfied with feeding birds in their yards and gardens. They loved being able to identify them by sound with the Merlin ID app. But, users needed more reasons to use the app regularly and stick around long-term. Could the Merlin ID app become the new face of the Lab to a larger, younger, more diverse audience? How could we turn MAUs into DAUs?

Content, community, and activities

The core of the vision is to engage and activate their expanding audience through social connections, participation in engaging activities, as well as entertaining nature-related content. The new Merlin will be the nexus of all the these things—between the Lab and their customers, between customers and each other, and between customers and the birds.

New feature ideas that create community and inspire curiosity about nature through content paired with activities.

What's the biggest obstacle?

When we spoke to birders and bird-lovers, we often heard the same thing—I don't know what to do. With further questioning, we uncovered for many, this was a problem of "where to go". Birders wanted to get outside and enjoy birdwatching, but deciding on a destination was a major obstacle. For others, they didn't have any direction beyond identifying birds in their yard by sound. If we could give people clear focus, we could suggest activities and places to go.

Quests, a concept from games

From my experience designing games, I knew we could drive specific user behaviors by giving users objectives, or quests. We could challenge our audience with activities that incorporate game mechanics like collection, streaks, medals, leveling, competition, and collaboration. With a quests platform, we could publish personalized quests based on people's interests, skill level, and social connections. And we could activate them to engage with their environment, with their community, and increase their impact on data science for conservation.

Community

We always hear about the essential power of community. Learning to identify birds is challenging. It requires mentoring, practice, and feedback. Rather than try to create a social network, our aim is to base the community on real friends who share an interest in birds. The goal for users is to learn and grow their interest, rather than amass an audience of followers. Initial prototyping has shown that a few interactions per week with real friends and the birds in their yard can translate into months of retention.

Simplified mocks for presenting community features and activities to the board of directors.

What's next?

Now that the team is aligned on a vision, we need to translate the vision into action. Next steps are to prioritize and sequence the feature set toward an incremental release cycle. We will carefully role out features, changes, and improvements and measure the impact—learning as we go.