Rainforest Wonders

This mobile application is an immersive environment to help users learn about the creatures living in the rainforests.

Ideation & Purpose

Rainforest Wonders is a passion project created to bring awareness to our rainforests. About 31,000 square miles of rainforest are destroyed each year. To help raise awareness of deforestation, this application is an immersive environment to help users learn about the creatures living in the rainforests.

VIEW Hi-Fi Prototype ➔

Information Architecture

Within our research, we first categorized the different types of creatures: birds, mammals, amphibians, and reptiles, which became the first-level after entering the application. The second-level breaks down into specific animal types, such as the hyacinth macaw, king vulture, toco toucan, and more. The third-level separates into three topics: biography, habitat, and fun facts, and has a consistent layout amongst each creature.

Lo-Fi Prototype

The low-fidelity prototype consisted of sketches to help get our initial ideas on paper. We practiced rapid prototyping by sketching ideas for 10 minutes before comparing ideas and combining our solutions. Even though there aren’t sketches for every screen, we wanted to organize how the main pages would be structured prior to creating any screens in Figma.

Mid-Fi Prototype

While building Rainforest Wonders, we focused on how users can fully immerse themselves into the environment. The first and second-level categories include a tile layout, showing the creature’s picture, name, and a sound button in the right-hand corner. The sound button plays the sound of each creature from their natural habitat. The third-level consists of a video in the biography with a few facts, a map underneath the habitat section to visually show their location, and five fun facts that make each creature unique.

Style Guide

The colors chosen for the app were inspired by common colors associated with rainforests: green as primary, and yellow as secondary. Ubuntu is the main font used throughout Rainforest Wonders. It was chosen because Ubuntu in Zulu represents humanity, meaning “I am, because you are,” and to use human kindness with our environment and creatures on Earth.

Hi-Fi Prototype

Explore the rainforest and interact with this high-fidelity prototype! (Created in Figma)

Informational Screens

Retrospective

Future work would include finding opportunities to increase engagement in the Rainforest Wonders app. To help with this, users would begin at a beginner’s level while learning about creatures in the application. After users navigate through the app and learn about a certain amount of creatures, their explorer level would increase and enable access to more animals in the application. There would also possibly be in-app purchases to enable more creatures and increase explorer levels. These funds would be donated to organizations preserving rainforests.

TimLattimer.com