Defining Your Audience

It’s important to do research before designing any project and an important component of that research is defining the audience. Knowing who you are designing for, what their motivations are, and what their life is like will help you create a product that will fit their needs.

To kick off my citizen science project research I read the article “The motivations, enablers and barriers for voluntary participation in
an online crowdsourcing platform” by Baruch, May, and Yu. In it, they discuss what kind of demographic uses the app and what causes them to participate. The researches note that different citizen science platforms attract different demographics for different, but for this particular study they focused on a platform called Tomnod. Tomnod posts campaigns where users can analyze what they find in satellite images. The persona I’ve created is based on this research.

While there are many men and women under the age of 49 who participate on Tomnod, the majority of users are age 50 or older. Many of them are retired, have a disability, or a long-term health issue and report that citizen science allows them to feel like they are still contributing to society even when they have trouble volunteering and they believe it’s a fulfilling way to use their time. Many people report enjoying the sense of community citizen science creates as well since it’s a large group of people working toward the same goal.

Because citizen science utilizes a large audience, it’s difficult to make sure everyone is happy. Some respondents said it was hard to be a part of the conversations because they didn’t have social media, some had trouble using some of the features and games on the website, and some felt that the Tomnod campaigns were getting monotonous. Another complaint shared by many was that they didn’t feel recognized for their contributions and that not enough information was given about the impact they were making. The contributors want to know that they are actually making a difference.

Throughout the project, “Meredith” will represent a major part of the audience I am trying to cater to for the citizen science platform.