Designing a visual user interface to digital Herbarium collections, driven by community and user needs
This site is the main product of a two-year (2019-2021) project that looked at user interfaces to online plant specimen collections, such as those typically housed in herbaria.
Our project was centered on two questions:
What are the interests and use cases for users of these collections?
Can we propose alternate design approaches that address user concerns better than existing interfaces?
These questions arose out of previous work which experimented with visual interfaces to the Brown University Herbarium using a large-scale display wall. It also came from a recognition that many existing interfaces were designed by and for professional, expert audiences engaged in directed search — which limited online plant collections’ efficacy by non-expert users in classrooms or public education contexts.
In short, while herbarium collections are increasingly available via the web, they often remain hard-to-access due to the design of their user interfaces.
Results
The project consisted of three distinct, but interrelated, component phases:
- A series of three 90-minutes consultation meetings with user-stakeholders (or potential user-stakeholders) of digital herbarium collections
- A period of analysis of the data collected from the meetings, which yielded a number of themes
- A design phase for a proposed interface design that incorporated many of the ideas and challenges identified in the data
In addition, we conducted a public survey that provided some data on the (non-specialist) public’s interest in plants.
The results of each of these project phases, which collectively constitute the primary project deliverables, can be found below:
Stakeholder study
Over the summer and fall of 2020, we held three remote sessions in which we consulted a total of 20 individuals that fell into three groups: undergraduate science educators, museum professionals, and Herbarium staff.
Meeting summaries
Survey of the public’s interest in plants
We were interested in getting a snapshot of what kind of role plants played in the broader campus community.
Over 400 individuals responded to our informal survey, which sought to better understand what non-specialist audiences found interesting in plants.
Interface proposals
Using the data gathered from the stakeholder study (above), we propose a visual interface that seeks to address many of the issues raised by the participants.
Additional materials
Contact
We embarked on this project with the community in mind, and we are treating this website as a conversation-starter. With the publication of this site in March 2022, we are considering what our next steps could be, and we are very interested in gathering partners.
Please feel free to reach out! We’d love to hear your thoughts.
Rebecca Kartzinel, Patrick Rashleigh, Tim Whitfeld
Our sincere thanks to the Institute of Museum and Library Services for their generous support.
