Designing iOS applications for New Zealand’s National Parks

Grant Baxter, University of Otago Part of CW12

This presentation will focus on how design ideation, visualisation, prototyping, and production tools and techniques can be used to produce better iOS applications. Description below:

With the growing adoption and importance of iPhones and iPads, multiple opportunities exist for these devices to enhance people’s experiences in New Zealand’s national parks. While there are a reasonable number of existing applications that could be considered useful to national park visitors, many are poorly conceived or executed and many fail to take advantage of modern iOS device capabilities.

This presentation will describe a series of studies that applied various ideation, prototyping, and production techniques to create a wide range of outcomes. These outcomes included a large number of iPhone application concepts, rapid prototypes, semi-developed iPhone applications, and fully functional iOS applications. All of these outputs were informed by wide ranging IDEO ideation, design, and production techniques, including: Activity analysis, Character Profiles, Extreme User Interviews, Fly on the wall, Paper Prototyping, Quick and Dirty prototyping, Scenarios, Try it yourself, and multiple site visits.

The presentation will then describe the development of four applications, and will go on to give a live demonstration of the applications. The four applications are:
(1)NZ Birds – an advanced prototype application with a corresponding web application visualisation tool
and (3) Arthur’s Pass Which Activity and Bird Identifier Game – two iPad applications used in Arthur’s Pass National Park over the 2011/2012 holiday period
(4) The Denniston application – an application co-designed with the Department of Conservation and available for download from the iTunes application store.

The presentation will end with a discussion of the co-design process used to develop the Denniston application with/for the Department of Conservation and how this process can result in better designed iOS applications.