Eclipse Soundscapes
Project Brief
Eclipse Soundscapes is a Citizen Science Project led by NASA and ARISA Lab. With the Eclipse Soundscapes platform, anyone can research the impact eclipses have on soundscapes and the environment. It is an accessible educational platform for citizen scientists to visualize and analyze sound data.
The Problem
There was no platform available for people to learn about the sound data they collected in their environment. Existing sound databases are not intuitive and did not follow accessiblity standards - thus excluding many people from participating in the research project.
The Goal
Create an accessible platform that allows people to learn about soundscape data and be able to analyze and visualize this research in a fun way.
Responsibilities
UX Designer / Research, User Persona, Wire Framing, Prototyping, Usability & Accessibility Testing
Tools
Figma, Miro
Prototype Demo
Research Insights
01 How to make learning fun?
'“Visualization of the data and receiving physical kits (science study kits) would be exciting.”
“Online courses are most effective for me when I'm able to change the playback speed and skip around.”
“Make the process more interactive.”
02 Feedback on Existing Website
Lack of a clear hierarchy of information.
Too much text displaying on the website.
Navigation bar is confusing.
Not consistent with image sizes.
Not visually appealing.
03 Accessibility
Color Blindness Simulator Testing
Video Captions + Transcripts
Semantic Structure
Labeled Forms
Keyboard Accessibility
Voice Assistant
Color Contrast Ratio
Key Performance Indicators
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Number of days volunteers are executing tasks.
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Number of completed tasks/sound recordings
How many people visit the website/app + frequency
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Users’ uploading feedback/academic response
Reliability of contributed data
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Total time spent by volunteers in executing project tasks
User Persona & Maps
User Persona / Shirley Liu
Journey Map / Jenny Zheng
Site Map / Tinrey Wang
Accessibility
Throughout our process, we were constantly thinking of ways to make our design more accessible using the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
We know how important it is for the user to be able to analyze data clearly, so one of the first issues I tackled was making data visualizations accessible. I wanted to make sure that people with different forms of color blindness would be able to see the graphs clearly.
Using Color Oracle, a color blindness simulator, we were able to test our design and see what it would be like for people with,
Deuteranopia: which is a difficulty distinguishing between red and green
Protanopia: where people have trouble distinguishing between blue and green
Tritanopia: which is a difficulty distinguishing between blue and yellow
Greyscale: which is total colour blindness, only viewing in shades of grey (or black and white)
No Colorblindness
Greyscale
Protanopia
Tritanopia
Deuteranopia
Color Contrast Check
