I just finished reading through the topic ‘Heavy sigh. Comments regarding the UNKNOWN option of identifying the observation’ which as started off by mazer. Many of the opinions given seems to be in regards to a dissonance between the new and the older iNaturalist users. Especially in regards to unclear pictures, lack of care in IDs, among other things. iNaturalist does have a ‘getting started’ page under the ‘more’ tab which briefly goes through the steps and gives a few tips such as identifying observations as as well as possible, even if the best you can do is ‘plant’. This page is honestly kinda hidden and new users may not know it even exists. The specification on clear images, iNaturalist’s focus on ‘wild’ organisms, and what to put into the iNat database is not in the ‘getting started’ page but in the ‘Educator’s Guide’. This ‘Educator’s Guide’ is targeted towards teachers and not the general iNat user. I believe much of the information on the page should be included in the ‘getting started’ page as well. This page should also be easier to find.
The guidelines may also not match up with the iNaturalist user culture. mazer made the observation that new users are discouraged due to the fact despite following the guideline they are doing things ‘wrong’. Many not knowing that older users of iNat placing a generic ID is not condescending but simply an attempt to get the new users a proper ID faster. Some new users are frustrated and confused causing them to respond in not-so-nice ways, while experienced users are getting tired of explaining themselves and how the platform works.
Since culture is something that is constantly changing a user input ‘Tips and Tricks’ page which is clearly advertised on the iNat website might be a way to curb the frustration felt by both new and old users. This could include highlighting the importance of identifying organisms and how to do it properly in detail, how to take better and clearer pictures, and what needs to be photographed of an organism for it to be easily identified. I guess it would be similar to a QnA page, but less questions and more detailed guidelines with reasons why to follow them (a QnA page may also be a great addition - for camera suggestions and whatnot). iNat states to identify organisms the best you can but fails to mention that giving even the most generic ID can help you get a response faster. I find that guidelines with reasons increases the number of people who follow those guidelines. User input forums can be rather messy, so it would be best that users are shown tips that already exist on the page while they type in the title so there are minimal repeats, or have the tips put into categories like in the iNat forum. However, this major change may take a while and be hard to do.
Is having a ‘Tips and Tricks’ page a good idea? Is there another way to incorporate new users? I would love to discuss this further.
I’m still rather new to iNat so I’m not entirely sure what would work and what wouldn’t. The things I state here probably aren’t going to be incorporated, but I think it’s a good idea to attempt to come up with solutions to mitigate this problem.
You have made a lot of good points here. Of course, a tips and tricks page would be great! I think many of the problems - Unknowns, adding photos of several species to one observation, etc. - would be solved if new iNatters had better help documentation to read.
But I think there are two things that interfere with that idea. First, many, MANY people do not read all the way through help documents before starting to use an app or the website.
Second, iNaturalist has been growing exponentially for about 12 years now. I think the iNat staff have coped incredibly well with that kind of growth, which is a hard thing to do. I’ve been using iNat heavily for almost 6 years now and the staff have been implementing small (but very useful!) changes over that time. Just recently, they released a soft launch of a re-designed app for iPhones; that’s a major change. I haven’t tried it (I have an Android phone), but it’s the first step towards a single unified and improved app - hooray! However, I will say that whenever I’ve witnessed major changes to any complicated digital system, it always seems to take two or three times as long to implement as was projected in the beginning.
In other words, iNat is making lots of changes to improve things while coping with a sheer avalanche of observations. The fact the whole site works as well as it does is simply amazing to me.
Is there a way to access these from the app? for the first half year that I had iNat I almost exclusively used the app, and I think that most new people who would benefit from these pages start out with just using the app.
I use the app quite a bit and it is extremely limited in comparison to the website. I can only see my own observations, I can’t look at or identify or locate other iNat observations. The website format is also horrific to use on mobile, it seems that the website can really only be used on a laptop or computer. The app lacks many of the guidelines and is really only a mobile tool to use for iNat website users. users who solely use the app miss out on the guidelines and may thus use iNat incorrectly. This may also be a reason for the dissonance between new and older users. Seek by iNaturalist is also a thing and I think beginners should start there before moving to iNat.
But considering iNat’s exponential growth it is doing extremely well.
I think the fact that many users start with the app (and are often explicitly encouraged to do so by the people introducing them to it), and often don’t even understand that iNaturalist is a project/platform with a website and not just an ID app, significantly impacts these issues of onboarding. The app, even the more featureful Android one, doesn’t have a very salient teaching process.
I’m hoping that the new app both has better onboarding to start with, and sets a foundation for future updates that could include further tools for teaching people how to best participate in the platform.
I am a relatively new user (about a year). A tips and tricks page could have helped me a lot! An example: I rely on the iPhone app. All year I struggled with taking photos because my Pro would suddenly switch lenses. I just kept trying to line it up again. I never thought there might be a fix, but there are fixes, such as to take close up photos outside the app.
I think of my year of unnecessary frustration. Please do all possible for new users, with high frustration tolerance, who may become valuable contributors, to get up the learning curve as fast as possible, even if they don’t think to search for tips and tricks. Make the link/pathway to solutions visible.
@danly, is this screenshot of the iOS app or the webpage? It’s identical to the webpage. The app on my Android looks totally different. I didn’t think that any of the apps (Android, original iOS, or new iOS) are identical to the webpage.
There should be at the very least a link to the website in the “About” menu of the app. Preferably more obvious than that, but at the very least it should be here.
Are you using iPhone or Android? On the Android app, there is a “hamburger” menu at the top right which brings up the Explore and Projects links, among others. You can also access your messages that way.
I use iPhone and I heard the iPhone version of the app doesn’t have as much functions as the Android version. I currently can’t find it on iNaturalist Next either.
The screen shot looks like its from the website (because of the ability to close the web tab at the top), it is hard to access the website on mobile though since the website is extremely shrunk down and the text is too small to read.
I gather the various ‘tips and tricks’ and resources that come up and save them to my profile. Here’s a copy. Some are individual things (eg. variations on the heatmap view) others are links to pages where a whole bunch of things are listed (eg. the extended search URLs).
I’ll admit that I didn’t read every post in this thread but from what I read it sounds like due to expansion of iNat over the years the user profile has changed dramatically, lots of new users, more seasoned users, novices and experts. What the iNat team needs is an informaticist to help bridge the gap between the various types of end users and the user interface and functionality and to define various user roles and responsibilities. I’m both and informaticist and and epidemiologist
(Public health infectious diseases) so I’ve seen the need for robust data collection and intuitive user interfaces to make both the data collection and data analysis as streamlined as possible. It’s very difficult to be all things to all users but if done correctly (and periodically reviewed and revised as needed) it can be most things to most users. It takes time and effort ( and a whole lot of patience) but it can be done.
I’m the sort of person who reads everything when I’m bored. To me, the Help pages on iNat are like the owner’s manual of a car - lots of useful information, but by the time you find and read them, you’ve already figured most of it out on your own. I don’t know at what point I read through all the Help pages, but it was definitely after I was already comfortable and competent with iNat’s features (uploading and identifying observations, using the Explore page, etc.) Part of that is due to the fact that they aren’t that obvious and there’s no onboarding process; part of it is just human nature. Most people prefer to learn by doing, rather than by reading pages of information, however well-formatted.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that, unfortunately, there’s only a small percentage of people who would actually pay attention even if the information was presented more clearly.
I appreciate your input. In terms of onboarding, I think it’s valuable to see the perspective of members such as you who haven’t been around long enough to pick up the wealth of tacit knowledge that it takes to use the system smoothly but – and this would probably be a minority of new members – are invested in the system enough to put in the effort of describing what works well and what’s really not obvious to you yet.
I remember, for example, needing to have it explained to me that the computer vision works a whole lot better if one fills in the location first before trying to look up the species, though species name is closer to the top of the observation box.
One small thing I’ve wondered about, which may belong in a different thread: I would estimate that, except for the Observations page, I use the Taxa Info more frequently than all the other menu items combined, yet it’s not a top level menu item. Other members will have different usage patterns, of course.
Also, I wonder how many complete newbies, especially ones who are still in school, would wonder, “What’s a taxa?” If I go to the knowledge base and search for the word, I find several articles, the first of which is among the General FAQs but is still not geared to someone who doesn’t know what a taxon even is. There are no matches if I search for “glossary”. It’d be really nice to have a glossary in a location where newbies could find it easily, and even nicer if it could be filtered by level so that newbies could easily find fundamental terms like “node” or “thorax” without having to sift through reams of technical terms such as, say, “hemelytra”.
I agree that new users aren’t likely to read a lot of text.
I do think there would be value in integrated tutorials to walk people through the process of adding observations the first few times, and perhaps once they have added a few dozen observations, some tips and guidance related to the ID process and how to make one’s observations most useful to scientists. I believe staff have indicated they are not fans of pop-up explanations, but perhaps this could be made optional (turn this option on for more detailled guidance).
Short video demonstrations might be useful, too. I know there are a couple already, but there are a lot of aspects of iNat that aren’t covered and I suspect there is room for improvement in the way the info is presented.
One important – and easily fixable – problem is that the help pages are currently fairly hidden and not very easy to find. On the website they are under “more” on the top menu. This is not where I would intuitively be looking for FAQs or help pages.
In the current android app, the “help” option is at least visible on the menu (albeit at the very bottom), but it does not take you to in-app help resources – it opens your browser to display the help pages on iNat, which is rather annoying. I realize the new app has a completely different design, but it seems worthwhile to consider a different solution for integrating the help pages in the Next app.
