Rethinking the home screen UX

[kazlauskis]

@cubitmg

• The home screen of this and the Butterflies app seems to be fundamentally designed around a casual sighting with a + or Record icon bottom centre. When Group records or starting from a Photo have been added to the app these seem to have caused some design issues and each are invoked using a different mechanism (neither of which are very intuitive in my view).
• Maybe the home screen should be more of a Record entry style menu and have a separate 'My records' screen as the Butterflies App does. The Home screen menu could have clearer buttons/icons for Add Casual Record, Add Record from Photo, Add Activity List, Add Group Survey.
• The latter two above could allow selection of the activity or group as a next step or this could be set in settings (short press) or long press to allow the selection?
• Activities icon could be removed from the icons at the bottom and could be under Settings or its own item under Menu.

[kazlauskis]

Thanks, this is an interesting discussion so I have moved it here. I agree the Activities could be moved to the Menu. The first point is a bit unclear to me - is there some specific difficulty with accessing the recording options right now? What are the design issues you mean?

[cubitmg]

Thanks. Good idea to move to a separate ticket.

The reason why I raised this was that I have not found it easy to find my way around the app. There is a lot of good and useful functionality, but I haven't found navigating to find what I need very intuitive. With your help I think that I know where most functions are now, but for new or infrequent users I am wondering whether a slight restructuring may make the app easier to use.

'Design issues'was probably the wrong term, I was more thinking that from the app design perspective it might have been difficult to find a consistent way to add the nice photo first function and also the survey add functions to a Home screen that also acts as a way to manage/view existing records. I was suggesting that splitting the add records from the existing records function onto different screens might make things easier. If you look at the BTO's BirdTrack app then their home screen has an Add Records button and a "My Lists" function on the ion bar at the bottom. The latter is rather like the iRecord Butterflies app "My Records" function. BirdTrack's home screen only has one add records function which is like the iRecord web application's "List of Records" function; as a result they only have one button for the user to add records. One suggestion would be to have three buttons on an iRecord home screen: Add causal record, Add Species Group Records and Use Photo to Add Record?

[kazlauskis]

Thanks. BirdTrack app's home screen has indeed one clear function but at the same time is wasting useful screen space. The user still has to tap on the 'Add Records' to start recording which is the same as tapping the Plus button in the iRecord App. I think, they could improve it by opening the recording screen right away in that tab - like the iObs app does (Dutch naturalist app).

I would like to keep the home screen as it is which is currently showing the user past records - this then could be extended to also show these on a map, statistics and verification statuses on the same page.

The advanced recording options - the surveys are intentionally hidden so that these don't clutter the view for 90% of the users. We could improve it by allowing the user to select the primary recording function - like a favourite survey that is instantly started without long-press when the recording button is pressed. Also, maybe adding some more guidance for the first-time users would be good.

We could also somehow visually group the camera button and the plus button, like keeping the same colour background since these two are very related.

The Activities might better be moved to the Menu to keep it cleaner too.

As an idea: