 Yes. Terrific. Well, look, my name is Morgan Curran. I work for FFW. I'm here from Cambridge, Massachusetts today, so really happy to be in Nashville. I'm joined by my client and partner, Mr. Greg Verudis, from National Audubon Society, and we're really excited to be here with you today. We're looking forward to sharing a project that we have been working on together over the last six to nine months and that we're continually working on. But essentially, it's data visualization for a better world, National Audubon Society, FFW, and Drupal. So we've had a fantastic time over the last six months working on this engagement and we wanted to share it with you. So before we dive in, a little bit about the team. Greg, why don't you come on up here and talk a little bit about your history. Thanks, Morgan. I'm Greg Verudis. I'm a data scientist and design technologist and what that means is my background is in geography. I like to make maps and other tools to visualize and communicate data to diverse audiences. My name is Morgan Curran. As I said, I work for FFW in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My background is in user experience design. When I started out in design, there was no user experience. There was no digital. So I'm aging myself a little bit there. Over the last 15 years or so, I've worked exclusively in digital experience design, starting out with large agencies. I've worked for Digitas for a long, long time and then more recently with children's K-12 education, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, working on helping them transform from a book publishing company to a digital learning company with distributed content. So that work actually prepared me very well for the engagement here at FFW with Greg and the Audubon team because we worked a lot on maps and visualizing data for children and making it so that they could easily understand what they were looking at without having to have it be interpreted for them. Additionally here, as with all things Drupal, Greg and I are on stage, but Joanna Grand is not here today but was very much part of the project, as were these folks right here and many others as well. So Greg and I are telling the story, but really it was a large distributed team effort. Okay, so before we dive in, we're going to talk to you a little bit about Audubon. You may have heard of the National Audubon Society. We're going to talk a little bit about it and how it came to be. We're going to give you some background on this engagement and why the Audubon Society was looking for a conservation tracker. We're going to talk you through our project process as we went through discovery, design, development, and then launch. And then we're going to demo the product in its current state. It's continually evolving, but we're going to share it with you as it exists today. Once we've done that, we'll talk a little bit about the technology and the data layers that underpin it and support it. And then finally, we're going to talk to you a little bit about lessons learned and the things that we're going to do moving forwards to continually improve it. Make sense? Cool. Okay, so over to Greg. Thanks, Morgan. I represent National Audubon Society, and some of you might be wondering what that is. The group began around the early 1900s, and it's the oldest such organization that blends science and education for the purpose of conservation. And in our case, it's avian conservation birds. What's really powerful about the Audubon Network is that it's mostly volunteer-driven. So I was able to attend our biannual convention this year, and you have volunteers, members from our different chapters, who are doctors, lawyers, and other professions by day, and then they spend their free time, and sometimes even their money, on supporting bird conservation because they are avid birders or they just really care about the species in general. The network also has these sanctuaries and centers, which are these scientific research nodes on the ground, local work to advance the mission, and then national and state offices, which I'm a part of. But you see this picture here of some fashionistas, and the origin of Audubon is actually a very interesting story, and I'll try to tell it well. These feather hats, there was a frenzy in the early 1900s people murdering up to five million birds a year to create these plumage, these hats. And in the early 1900s, we saw women conservationists, mostly based in Florida, coming to the forefront and basically saying, this is not right. And so it was the first time a popular movement coalesced around the defense of the environment, and not surprisingly, in this case, it was to save birds. So how do we fast forward 100 years? How do we go from this early beginnings to a high-tech, leading-edge, science-based conservation organization, which is what I would classify us as now? Audubon's unique in that it has this powerful network, as I mentioned, these three tiers, national, state, and local. But really, to be honest, the local piece is what drives the group, because it's volunteer-based and so much more. Some of you may have heard of the Christmas Bird Count, the CBC, it's the oldest-running community science program in the world. People have been going out after Christmas to their backyards and their neighborhoods and counting birds. But if you break down Audubon and many other conservation, environmental conservation organizations, they're really pretty similar. You might have heard of groups like the World Wildlife Fund and the Nature Conservancy. Very similar missions, but the one thing I've learned in having worked with a few of them is that they all operate under slightly different currencies. And as you might imagine, the currency with Audubon is birds and their habitats. Interestingly, probably the most cutting edge or new program that I'd like to share a quick story about is our Climate Watch program. And Climate Watch, what it really tries to do is just move beyond the issue of politics when talking about climate change and instead, trying to let birds tell the story of how climate change is affecting birds and the environment. So many Audubon members, like I mentioned, are from traditionally red states. And so bringing up the topic of climate change is not generally recommended. So what we do is we say, you are our members. You care about birds. Go out to your backyard. Go out to your neighborhood park and tell us, are you seeing the same birds you've been seeing over the last 10, 50, 100 years and let the birds tell that story and validate some of our scientific models and other tools that we're using to understand this? So they go out. Maybe they see new species that they never have before because these birds are colonizing areas that traditionally they hadn't. Or maybe something that they're used to seeing, a bird that they're used to seeing is disappearing. And we can tell that story and we can share it with other people in a very agnostic sort of apolitical way. And then not to belabor this point, but just the network being very powerful, very adaptive, and volunteer driven allows us to do a lot of things that other organizations won't, including investing in technology and what we're about to show you today. So that's why I believe Audubon's unique and now sort of the ask, the reason why we started this project, which we call the conservation tracker. My boss is boss, Audubon's chief conservation officer, asked a very fundamental basic question to the organization and it was, how are we doing? You know, what are our vitals? Are we actually having an impact? Are we moving the needle? Are we just spending donor and foundation dollars on this mission that is not having any result? And that's actually a really difficult question to answer when you're talking about science-based work and advocacy. So we knew pretty quickly who our audience was. We wanted to be accountable to our funders and our board, but the purpose evolved over time and we started to see some challenges. Because the Audubon network is so broad, as I've mentioned, there's really no centralized data management, no authoritative data that we could draw upon. Everybody had their own orphan Google docs floating in the ether and nobody really was talking to anybody else. And then these challenges you see here on the right, hopefully you can see, I don't think they're unique to Audubon. I think every organization, whether they're private, public, for profit, struggles with this. Experts working in silos, technical and tech infrastructure under development, and so forth. But the one I want to highlight and was really a big barrier to entry for us with this tool was resistance to change. You have groups that have been doing their spreadsheets and their finances and their data management the same way for so many years, that this is really why we designed the tool and what something we knew we were going to have to struggle with from the start. And the last thing I'll say is that the literature says time and time again that co-developing, co-designing something so that it's not done in isolation, but with others, with stakeholders, we're going to essentially drive the process and produce a tool that's more meaningful and salient to those involved is really important. So we set out to engage people from the very beginning, our board and our donors, leadership, conservation staff, everybody in the network. And it became pretty clear that the first use case for this tool, which you'll see in a moment, was for fundraising, so that we could fundraise the development of our back end, which is still under development. Nobody wants to fund a back end. They want to see a sexy front end and use that to fund the back end. So that became pretty clear early on, as well as this whole accountability piece and priority setting and so forth. So that's where we are. And fortunately, we asked FFW to help us out in this venture. And they said yes. And Morgan's going to tell you about it. Terrific. Thank you. So Greg has given you guys a background on Audubon and what the need was there. I'm going to talk a little bit about the project itself and the engagement and the process that went into it. So first of all, a little bit about the ask. One of the things that we talked a lot about during our discovery process was this crossing point, this nexus between conservation and technology. How can we use one to leverage the other and amplify in the process? Similarly, as Greg mentioned, there were many different audiences for conservation information and conservation tracking information. How could we build an experience that worked well for those various audiences who sometimes have very different needs? Some are scientific and professional, while others are grassroots and non-professional, if you like. And we decided that we wanted, decided very early on, that we wanted to have a destination we drove people to for individual bird species and individual landscapes that was a content and data-rich report card. So a consistent experience that was data visualization that brought together all the various disparate content and information sources that were sprinkled throughout the organization and that were available through various different sources. How could we bring all those together in one place under a great experience? And then lastly, use site metrics to drive most popular information. We see this every day on consumer retail sites. You go to Amazon. You go to eBay. You might also like. People like you also looked at X. So how can we bring that type of experience to the conservation tracking world, where there are literally thousands of species and thousands of landscapes? Instead of asking people to start at the top every single time, how can we use their behavioral data to drive the experience and narrow it a little bit when they come in the front door, so that they're seeing species from their location or that other people like them have also looked at? From a user experience point of view, we want us to make it interactive, make it easy, make it flexible, and make it compelling. You know, sometimes when a lot of data comes together in one place, you get this kluge experience that's not really that useful, that you kind of have to wade through. We wanted to try and be clean about it and really deliver a beautiful experience that showcased all the data, but not in a way that was overwhelming. We wanted to visualize rather than list data wherever possible, so show it rather than tell it. Have map information talk to chart and graph information and vice versa. One of the things that we talked a lot about was making the data manipulable, allowing very tactile interactive control of data, so that as folks moved around and interacted with the maps, so charts and graphs would update and vice versa. Don't let the data overwhelm the experience. There's so much information about some of these species and landscapes that it was difficult to say, okay, look, how can we put this in a small space on a screen and make it work well? And then lastly, integrate it seamlessly with the existing autobahn.org site. I don't know if you've been to autobahn.org, but it is a beautifully designed, incredibly visual, very clean design experience, and so we wanted to make sure we mapped right into that, so we adopted a lot of the look and feel conventions from it. Specific requirements that we were given when we went through our discovery process, concentrate raw conservation data together in one place and visualize it so it tells a compelling story about what's happening with a particular species or landscapes in terms of threats to it, actions being taken to mitigate those threats, responses based on those actions, so not only snapshotting the information but showing progress over time. And then against those actions, what conservation efforts are in place to protect that species or landscapes in terms of goals, specific initiatives, partnerships with outside organizations, and individual priorities within a larger goal. Be able to answer those common questions and address consistent needs, such as Greg's boss is boss, how are we doing? So be able to use the data to actually deliver an insight, not just to deliver the data for the sake of it. And then obviously communicate trends over time and that's the tracker part of the experience. So that was the ask, if you like. I'm gonna switch gears now and talk a little bit about the process that we went through. So many of you in the room here will be very familiar with what you're seeing here. It's similar to many other software development processes. We like to think that we over-index on the early part of it that we call discovery because really focusing on understanding and clarifying with our client what the business goals are at the same time that we're looking at user needs and wants, at the same time that we're looking at the technology underpinnings that have to support the experience is where you get to that sweet spot that is what we will design and build. We've all been in situations where a design has happened that just can't be built because the technology doesn't exist. Or we've built something that's fantastic from a technical point of view but the experience is not that great or it doesn't meet the business goals. We focus really, really carefully on understanding that sweet spot where business, user and system interact to get to an optimal solution. From the point of view of the conservation tracker we went through that process working with Greg and his team. We then wire framed it out so that we could see the progression or the user journey through the experience. We built out the interactive reports seeing what the data actually looks like once it showed up because sometimes it looks good and sometimes it's not so cooperative and you have to work with it. We tested it with various audiences to make sure that it was working and we revised based on that before working with our technology team in a very agile way. And that's not to say that the technology team was not involved throughout because they were. It's very much a part of the way we work that we're highly collaborative between business and strategy, design and development. Okay, so as Greg said our experience strategy was to really connect with people that are passionate about conservation. Primarily funders and donors on the Audubon board but secondarily Audubon conservation staff, scientists working on conservation, the Audubon network so that loose network of connected organizations and of course the general public. And what you're looking at here below is what we developed as the primary user journey or happy path if you like. We wanted to make sure that there was a warm welcome when people landed in the conservation tracker world because there's a lot of data in there. There's a lot of information, a lot of content. So that first glimpse where you established the mental model for the experience is very, very important. We then wanted to make sure that we put in place a powerful search mechanism so that whether folks wanted to search by keyword, by hunt and pack if you like, clicking through and browsing or by another means we gave them multiple avenues into the data. Once they'd down selected to either a subset or a single species or landscape that they wanted to learn more about, make that data interactive. Allow people to interact with it, touch it, move it around, play with it to make it the way they want. Make it easy to download. So as Greg has mentioned, various different audiences had multiple needs for the content. And so we wanted to make it easy to deliver on that. And then lastly, make sure that people leave having had a good experience. You know, from a user experience point of view, which is what I focus on, that takeaway experience is very important because if they come in, they have a good experience and they leave happy, they'll say something about it or they'll come back. And we intend for this tool to be used as, you know, not just a one time thing but as a continual resource for people interested in tracking conservation. Okay, just before we look at the prototype itself, we had some stuff to work with when we started. There was an initial prototype that had been built to connect some of the data sources to visualization tools, whether those were bar charts or mapping experiences. But what we were finding is that when all of those things showed up on the screen, they weren't really telling a story and they weren't really working together to deliver insights. It was just an accumulation of data. And so we worked very hard with Greg and Joanna and the team to really map out the real estate because don't forget on the web, you're dealing with a low resolution sequential environment. So there's only so much you can bring together in one space and you have to balance and compromise and make decisions about what to show first, second, third, I call that eyeball management, but it's very important, especially when you're bringing together a lot of data, a lot of content in a tight space. So once we talked through that and done quite a bit of virtual whiteboarding, we went through a process of building out wireframes. Are you guys familiar with wireframes? Have you worked with those before? Pretty straightforward. We worked in desktop and mobile because this is a fully responsive experience and we have break points in between so it will work on tablets, both landscape and portrait as well. But you can see that we worked through the welcome experience, landing pages and then specific deeper dives so as that we understand how the information presents at multiple levels of depth from welcome right through to interactive report card at the most detailed level. Once we built out the wireframes, we worked on visual design comps and we built a clickable prototype. Now, this is not code. This is not developed in Drupal. This is essentially static comps that are daisy chained together in order to simulate the experience of the developed code. And what that allowed us to do was it allowed us to take it and share it with various target audiences and get feedback, which was hugely important because things that we think, oh, it's very straightforward. You can get from A to B, no problem. It's pretty easy. You find that other folks might get hung up on and vice versa, things that you think weren't such a big deal. People say, wow, that's really cool. So this process of learning as you design continuous iteration is really, really important when it comes to good data visualization experiences. And you'll see as we look through the actual live site now in a moment, things that you see here didn't make it into the design or things that you see here have been refined and enhanced in the actual design. Okay, let's switch gears one sec. The reason I asked is because we put FW on a pretty tight timeline and we started this in about October and now we have a working prototype, so all this is a Patrick and Morgan and others who probably really appreciate their dedication and pushing this out quickly but also at a high level of quality. Thanks, Greg. So we're gonna take a quick look at the actual live experience right now but before we dive in, I just wanna say a little bit about autobahn.org, the conservation tracker is based on the look and feel of the live autobahn.org site which is just spectacular from a visual point of view. One of the things that Greg and his team are really lucky is that people take photographs of birds all the time and they submit them for competitions to autobahn. So they have this incredible library of just fabulous imagery that is used throughout the site experience and is constantly being refreshed because there's annual photo competitions for both professional photographers, amateur photographers, youth photographers with the result that the site is visually stunning. So we wanted to steal with pride all of that that had already been done and that was working really, really well as we thought through the conservation tracker. So switching over to the conservation tracker here you can see that the global mass had and the welcome image convention is adopted 100%. You have this parallax experience here where you scroll down to reveal the page that you're on. And so this is the welcome experience for the conservation tracker. You can see that there's three major areas within it, strategies, species and landscapes. Essentially those are three buttons. So you can choose to search by keyword if you would like to get to something specific if you know what that is. Or you can click on one of the main areas and we'll go into each one of those in a little bit more detail in a moment. Or you can click on some of the information that's popular right now. And this is what I talked about a few moments ago in terms of using site usage metrics to drive experiences on the homepage, to shortcut the journey for folks within a certain geography with a known interest, with a previous visit that we know something about. So to the extent that we can use data of actual behavior on the site to then drive a shortened experience in the future, we'll try to do that whenever we can. While Morgan's showing this, I realize 99 maybe 100% are conservation, but maybe just think about it through the lens of your own work, whether it's for profit or whatever it is, because we really, we hope this site might be useful for other groups that want to take this down in the layout and just swap in different content or different controls. So I think it's pretty modular, pretty flexible. And that's just one thing we're thinking about. So yeah, keep that in mind as you. Yeah, we've done a lot of work with maps and manipulating map data as part of this process. So again, that's transferable to any application where you need to show data connected to topography in some way. Okay, so let's dive in. We're gonna click through to the strategy section first. Woo, we got bandwidth. So again, beautiful imagery, just stunning imagery of birds available to us all the time. And this is the strategy section. So it's kind of small, can I make it any bigger? That's a little bigger. So each strategy is broken down into coasts, working lands, water, bird friendly communities and climate. And within each one of those categories or sections, there's an overview which you're seeing displayed right here. You can look at goals associated with that strategy, whether those are conservation goals or engagement goals. You can see the partners that Audubon is working with and who are either contributing to or benefiting from the experience. You can see specific initiatives associated with that strategy. And then the priority bird species and landscapes that it touches. And you have the ability to move things around. The map is fully interactive. You can click on any one of the nodes here to see a little bit about what's happening in that particular area relative to the strategy that we're looking at right now. So this is where the data visualization aspect of this comes into play. It's highly interactive, highly manipulable. And while not all the data is in place for every single landscape or every single species yet, the goal ultimately is to be able to click through from any of these nodes to what we talked about a few moments ago, which is the interactive report card for that landscape or that species, which is that rich data environment on a single screen. We're gonna look at that in a few moments. The mapping sometimes can be a little bit too much in terms of the limited real estate with mobile. So I think in one overview, we made the call to cut the map just because it wasn't adding enough value where it was worth taking up that real estate. But for the most part, the mobile and the desktop versions are identical except for the layout. Yeah, go ahead. The data demo, the CSB, the BDS, are those static? Where does the data go on the fly? On the fly. And how are you doing that in my master? I mean, right now, I mean, we have plans to have the data up in this behind it, but it's the idea of because we just didn't have the data, so we didn't build the data up. So right now, we're actually tracing possibly by a little bit. I'm sure it's a bit of a mistake but once they're tracing files hard, it just gets, how do I get this to get across? Hello. What did you use to make those? The files themselves, the flat files were created in Sketch and the clickable prototype was created in InVision. There's a hundred different ways you could do it though, but InVision is just fast and it's also very shareable. So we could essentially share the link with Greg and his team and they can make comments right in the file. So it's one of those like Google Docs. It's the Google Docs version of prototyping essentially. Yeah, I liked InVision a lot as my first time using it. We would get on call sometimes, remote team collaboration. We'd be talking to FFW and they would be taking notes in InVision and it was all, we could see it with screen share. So it was just very easy to annotate, make changes and then make sure we knew who was gonna be making those edits. And I think when you've got remotely located teams, that ability to see the same thing at the same time and to annotate and make comments on the file itself while the discussion is happening, it's huge because if somebody takes notes and then they have to go back and relate that to a designer who then has to make the updates, share the link with the client who then says, well, that kinda wasn't what exactly I was looking for. Bang, all that goes away. So that process, and we talked about it like collaboration, it's, there's so many decisions to be made that that process of thinking it through together is hugely beneficial in terms of getting to a good result in the end. Hey. From the beginning of discovery to actually reaching the final design with some element of actual music that's in between and four leads. So tell me a little bit more about your, I mean, you talked about the tools now. How, especially the whole of you distributed, how on earth did you manage to get, I mean, it's clearly, it's more than just like, but tell us a little bit more about your user testing process. Well, the project took more than four weeks. It was more like four months. But the user experience, the testing, well, right, the design portion was pretty quick. Essentially, once we have the clickable prototype in InVision, you have something to test that represents the primary journey, not every single screen, but just enough to make it feel real, if you like. What we did is we put together a script based on our understanding of the target audiences and what their needs and wants were. So we asked them, you know, what are the types of things you wanted to get done? Can you do them? Can you find this? Are you able to find a specific species? Can you tell us what the threat is to a specific landscape and so on? And so we sort of probed for people's ability to intuitively get to the information from the highest level. And from the most part, they could. It was surprising. You know, there was very few things that tripped people up, a couple of labels. So we went back in and we put in instructional copy here and there to just help people if there was a kind of a hesitation moment, because we were watching at the same time. We did the user testing remotely, but with video. So you had a video of the person doing the test, you had a video of what they were doing on screen, and then there was the questionnaire moderator guide that we went through as we went through the process. That was where we had one sacrifice based on timing. We had very little time, so we used designated experts that Audubon nominated for us. But we were at least able to go to different divisions, so it wasn't just our science division, it was across. I'll just add that something that's kind of stressing me out now is the next step, which is we did the user testing, the user acceptance testing, and now it's like, okay, we have a prototype, and next week I go to New York City to work with our development team. So development is the fundraising unit of our group and get them actually interacting with the world. Trying to convince them that this tool can be useful for their work. If this can save them time, it's not just another tool. And I don't know if you folks familiar with like the human-computer interactions literature, but this divide between the developer, us, and the user, them, is what we're trying to narrow. And I don't know if anybody has thoughts, suggestions, words of wisdom, I'd be happy to talk afterwards because you can develop something as beautiful as it is and as solid and bug-proof as it is on that end, but are people actually gonna use it? That's always the issue with technology at the end of the day. So we're trying to unwrap to that, and we have a whole digital onboarding exercise, but we'll see. Are you doing anything with authenticating users? Is it always an anonymous user experience, or are you getting information for fundraising or planning on blanking data for this? Yeah, that's a great question. We had some ideas on that in the beginning, but it evolved into right now, but because some of the information is still pretty sensitive, and we still have to work that out through different committees that we're organizing, it's password protected and for internal use only. But let's fast forward. Once we're through that and we have a body of reports and things that we want to share and then we want to make it public-facing, we'll remove the password screen and then we would talk with FFW to develop a user login and that sort of thing so that we could have information about them if that's the path we want to take. So we wanted to do that upfront, but we decided it was probably best to wait until we were ready to make it public-facing for that sort of credentials and whatnot. I don't know if Patrick would be able to. I mean, other ideas we had, just like you location, just because they're birds, so I think we don't have to get like close to you to see what kind of birds you have in the neighborhood. I mean, the data they have is just insane to be honest. I mean, if they have a lot of attitude, so you can actually look at the yard or something like that, so I guess like 500 birds or something like that. So, I mean, that was the idea, but when you get to the species stage, it's like if you have quite a few birds in the neighborhood. I think there's also, there's a crawl, walk, run aspect to it. I think you have to get something out there first. And then we've talked a lot about passive personalization and active personalization. Passive personalization is what do we know about you when we know nothing about you? How did you arrive? What search term did you use? What site domain did you come from? You know, what do we know about you that we can use to sort of passively personalize the experience, as Patrick just mentioned? Seasonal information, geographic information, demographic information, and then over time, the run aspect becomes the integration of, is it Aquialift or some sort of a personalization experience that would allow us to really, really understand who that visitor was because they had a profile. And then you can return them. You can return them. People would like that. Exactly right. Yeah. But also, you were talking about like the annual collection of data as well. Can't you collect that now online, giving it to their local groups or how does that work? It runs the gamut, so yeah. I mean, there's, like the Christmas bird count once a year, we have the final watch program which is twice a year, and then sometimes it's even more frequent and sometimes it's less frequent, so it's just so diverse and that's why we wanna try to centralize all this stuff. And so we're having, you know, developing forms where people can add data and it'll all seamlessly talk to each other, but going back to your previous question, I think it's a good reminder about demographics and just understanding our user a little better and that's something we'll have to look into once it's a little bit more advanced. There was one other question here and then I think we're gonna have to wrap it up. Hi. Great question. So right now it's my colleague and I, Joanna, who are gonna be kind of maintaining it and because it's just these JSON files, it's pretty manageable, but we're developing...