When I decided to provide my UX skills for Orcasound during DemocracyLab’s “Hacky New Year” hackathon in January of 2020, I was intrigued by the vision and mission shared by Scott Veirs to use tech for Orca conservation. I was excited about the cutting-edge technology being used to not only manufacture the underwater hydrophones by volunteers, but also the Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence being developed to listen for and identify Orca calls in real-time. 

As I became more involved with Orcasound, I saw a clear need for an organized approach to providing UX that would benefit the experience visitors had when browsing the site and listening to the hydrophones. 

I started by running a usability study of the then beta version of the listening app (since then it has been implemented to the live site). I had a Mixed Methods approach for that study, and was curious about what different types of personas existed for Orcasound. This led to a user research study that uncovered 3 distinct persona types. 

While conducting these studies, I started leading the Orcasound UX efforts during the DemocracyLab hackathons that are run every other month. 

I loved all this UX work that I was doing, but my vision far exceeded my bandwidth. I decided that building a team of amazing UX volunteers would speed up the needed UX work for Orcasound. 

During the spring of 2020, I began recruiting interested UXers and formed a powerhouse team. You are reading this because you are interested in joining other UX rockstar volunteers who want to use their UX skills to benefit orca conservation while fostering professional growth. Welcome to the team!

Scott has always been really supportive of taking a user-centric approach to designing the website, and provides valuable input to the team. We have weekly UX stand ups, which you’ll be sent a calendar invite to. Each team member is encouraged to work on projects that interest them, and usually these projects are completed by “sub-teams”, with regular progress updates given during weekly stand ups. 

Feel free to explore the resources provided to you below, and reach out if you have any questions!