A white male waterfowl hunter facing away from the camera, looking at and interacting with a paper prototype of our design

For a course in interaction design, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) asked that we look into ways to update their annual migratory waterfowl hunter harvest survey, which is a physical survey form sent to tens of thousands of registered waterfowl hunters in the U.S. every year. The survey is a diary asking the hunters to record their hunting experiences throughout the season, and the USFWS uses that information to estimate the populations of different types of waterfowl as well as to determine bag limits for hunters each season. Because of this symbiotic relationship, the response rates for the survey are 50%, which is actually quite high, but the design of the survey creates user input errors that the USFWS staff end up having to correct before the data can be evaluated. Our task was to provide recommendations for how to improve the user experience of tracking their hunting experiences, as well as for ways to increase user response rates to make the data more reliable.

We researched our user population and survey design for a literature survey, developed user personas based on this background information, used convenience sampling to generate a group of users, created and tested a paper prototype of a website/mobile application version of the survey, created and virtually tested a digital version of the survey, and ultimately brought our recommendations to the client.

Client: United States Fish and Wildlife Service
Group Members: Jessica Lieberman, Rachel Sherard, Clay Siefken
Professor Greg Walsh
IDIA 612: Interaction and Interface Design, The University of Baltimore

Pencil sketch of accordion-style site for the waterfowl survey
A black male waterfowl hunter interacting with the paper prototype and explaining his process and choices
A white male waterfowl hunter facing away from the camera, looking at and interacting with a paper prototype of our design
All of the pages that comprised our paper prototype for user testing a digital version of the USFWS annual waterfowl hunter survey
A white male non-hunter who otherwise fit the demographics of our user group testing our virtual prototype using Axure
An email design featuring a photo of a family of waterfowl encouraging a survey participant to log their hunts
The presentation screen listing our main recommendations to help increase response rates from waterfowl hunters to the annual survey sent out by the USFWS
© Jen Kristen Taylor // March 2022