Translating this user flow into a “My Heat Journal” app experience.
As identified from the user flow MVP, there were three main functions to build out. The interaction for adding a new heat journal entry, reviewing/analyze past heat journey entries, and sending these entries to the UrbanHeatATL research team.
Add a new heat journal entry
Here users are able to use a slider to select their relative comfortability at that moment in time, centering their subjective and qualitative experience as opposed to discrete categories.
After selecting their heat level, users are prompted to take a photo of something in their environment that is impacting the heat comfortability in some way. This is intentionally minimal, leaving space for a reflective experience. Early flow testing showed that too much instructional text at this step broke the reflectie mood of the walk.
Lastly, to place the use in the mindset of action and agency, they are prompted to select ways that they could increase their comfort level. The tags are pre-populated from participant research but “add your own” is present to provide room for other context.
Viewing past heat journal entries
Being able to sort through past heat journal entries proved helpful for participants to be able to have conversations with each other about collective patterns that they noticed.
These localized data archives also allowed for any data to remain in the hands of citizen scientists unless they manually chose to share it to researchers.
Send data to UrbanHeatATL
researchers and other beneficiaries
If citizen scientists are in a position where they are interested in and willing to collaborate with academic researchers from the UrbanHeatATL team, they are able to package up their heat journals and share as a zipped file. They have control over what days and specific data is included in this file to ensure a consentful data experience.
This experience also prioritizes citizen scientists making their data actionable outside of an academic context by allowing them to share their data with other self-defined groups like organizing circles or neighbors.