My final project focuses on wildlife and its conservation. In Part II I will focus on building a narrative that will work as path to take the readers through my story.
For storyboarding, I decided to use shorthand. Since my main medium for telling the story of wildlife conservation is Shorthand (as mentioned in Part I), I believe that using the same medium to form a showcase to the interviewees for their feedback will help me obtain more specific responses and comments. The link to my storyboard on Shorthand can be found here. Flourish was used to build visualizations and canva to create infographics.
As user research protocol, I will define the following:
Based on this pre-defined protocol, I will provide an overview of the interview findings and explain the changes that will be implemented in the final phase of the based on user feedback.
Through this project, I hope to strike a chord with those who hope to affect positive change in the environment but haven’t yet gone down that very rewarding path. The learnings from this project will address every individual across the globe and is a call to come together to help conserve the natural world. With this in mind and with the sole aim of narrowing down the audience pool, I will focus my attention on those individuals who are recent graduates, current students in field of environmental students or those individuals who have worked or are currently working with any environment/ wildlife focused organization. This is because going forward, they will be the change makers.
Based on my definition of target audience, I will interview those candidates who fall into each of the buckets of: recent graduate, student in any field of environmental studies and those individuals who have worked or are currently working with any environment/ wildlife focsued organization.
When choosing an individual who is working in an environment focused organization, I will interview them who have a travelling job. This is because they are the ones who are on-ground and not confined to an office room when making impactful decisions.
In addition to professional features, I will also consider the following markers when choosing an individual:
I will breakdown the interview questions that I will ask based on certain criteria that I hope to measure through user interviews. My interview questions will be loosely based on previously conducted user interviews for the course and general market research questions.
The criteria are as follows:
| Evaluation Criteria | What I Hope to Evaluate | Guiding Questions |
|---|---|---|
| Relatability | To evaluate whether the story being presented strikes a chord with the interviewee. This will help me measure if I have chosen the right representative to interview. |
1. From the title page, what do you hope to see in this storyboard? 2. Is topic of interest to you and do you have prior knowledge of it? 3. What were you surprised to find out? |
| Emotional Appeal | To evaluate if the story arc I followed in designing my narrative invokes emotions as I had hoped it would. |
4. Are you moved by each piece of information presented to you? 5. What changes, if any, would have had a bigger emotional impact on you? |
| Clarity of Visualizations | To evaluate if I chose visualizations that are easy to follow and if they are perceived as I want them to be. |
6. Are the visuals representative of what they are trying to convey or do you think you are being misinformed? 7. Would you change anything wrt to the visuals that have been presented here? |
| Overall Aesthetics | To evaluate the overall visual appeal, themes and images that were used. |
8. What is your general reaction to the aesthetics of this storyboard? 9. What work for you and what do not work for you in this storyboard (i.e., what would you change?) |
| Persuasiveness | To evaluate if the story is persuasive and if one can be expected to adopt the call to action when presented with it. |
10. How loud is the call to action? 11. Will this presentation get you thinking about how you can be a part of saving the biodiversity? |
| Lacking | To evaluate for the completeness of my story. | 12. Do you think there is an important component missing in the story that can tie to together in a better way? If yes, what additions can be made? |
| Overall Narrative | To obtain details of their final thoughts and recommendations. | 13. Is the overall narrative what you hoped to see? 14. Is there anything that I missed in my previous questions that you would like to address? |
| Target Audience Category | Home Country | Age | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Interviewee 1 | Recent graduate | India | 24 |
| Interviewee 2 | Student in a field of environmental studies | Amsterdam | 30 |
| Interviewee 3 | Intern at Environmental Defense Fund | USA | 26 |
| Question | Interviewee 1 | Interviewee 2 | Interviewee 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. From the title page, what do you hope to see in this storyboard? | “I hope to see more information about wildlife conservation around the world.” | “I hope to see a persuation to encourage people to care for wildlife.” | “What I expect is how man-kind has destroyed wildlife and you will show something that will make people want to save wildlife.” |
| 2. Is topic of interest to you and do you have prior knowledge of it? | “This topic is is interest to me but I don’t have any prior knowledge of it.” | “It is a grey area for me. I have interest and slight knowledge/” | “It is definitely interesting and the only knowledge I have is in terms of how global warming affects wildlife and how animals are getting extinct and humans are playing a key negative role in it.” |
| 3. What were you surprised to find out? | “I was surprised to find that global forest cover is disappearing at a rate of 1 football fields every 6 seconds. It was also interesting to note that there was a measure called the LPI and was surprised to see its rapid decline.” | “I was not surprised by anything.” | “I did not know that wildlife referes to flora and fauna. I was also very surprised to find out the 6th mass extinction and the LPI.” |
| 4. Are you moved by each piece of information presented to you? | “Moderately moved.” | “No, because several of them were expected.” | “I was most moved by the LPI, species extinction and anything that had to do with animals.” |
| 5. What changes, if any, would have had a bigger emotional impact on you? | “I don’t have any inputs on this.” | “I think connecting the flow of the story and moving from each page with a better flow would have helped. I had to actively keep in mind the takeaways from each page. The pages seemed isolated and not interconnected.” | “If something was there that showed how I was also a part of the problem, I would have been more invested emotionally.” |
| 6. Are the visuals representative of what they are trying to convey or do you think you are being misinformed? | “I think they are conveying what they are meant to convey.” | “The visuals were apt and correctly matched thediscussion.” | “I don’t think there is misinformation.” |
| 7. Would you change anything wrt to the visuals that have been presented here? | “I would remove the dots from the LPI graph and the decline in the global forest cover graph because it doesn’t seem necessary to know where each year falls.” | “In the plot, decline in the global forest cover, maybe represent the numbers in 00000s. Everything else looks good! “ | “I would prefer inverting the color schemes on the visuals.” |
| 8. What is your general reaction to the aesthetics of this storyboard? | “Its very nice and concise and does not overload you with information.” | “Neat, HD images were great.” | “I like it a lot. You could add another divider before ‘Resources’.” |
| 9. What work for you and what do not work for you in this storyboard (i.e., what would you change?) | “The overall flow worked. I would prefer additional information on how we can help because you talk a lot about the consequences but not a lot about the possible remedies.” | “What works was that the titles give a gist of message and highlited text help as well. There are a few pages with a written paragraph without titles. This causes me to lose track.” | “It’s a mix of eveything discussed earlier.” |
| 10. How loud is the call to action? | “It inspires a feeling of wanting to do and learn more about how we can remedy this situation.” | “The call to action seemed so far away that my willingness to read went down. starting off with call to action and then proceeding would have been nicer.” | “Since your call to action has two questions it’s trying to answer, give equal weightage to both of them.” |
| 11. Will this presentation get you thinking about how you can be a part of saving the biodiversity? | “Yes.” | “Yes” | “No.” |
| 12. Do you think there is an important component missing in the story that can tie it together in a better way? If yes, what additions can be made? | “Maybe something about how climate change also plays a role in this.” | “Improving the flow between the slides. They are organized in a great order. I want to feel more engaged.” | “More information on what I as an individual can do.” |
| 13. Is the overall narrative what you hoped to see? | “Not really. I thought I would see information about what is being done to conserve wildlife” | “Yes.” | “To some extent, yes.” |
| 14. Is there anything that I missed in my previous questions that you would like to address? | “Add brackets to references to help identify them more easily.” | “I lost focus from species Extinction but looking at famous extinctions caused by man caught my attention but dropped again as that slide ended.” | “I don’t think so.” |
The following are the changes I will be making in the final stage of the project. They are listed here based on previously defined evaluation criteria.