Exploring the outside world

Young aspiring rangers could explore the forest and learn almost everything that lives inside it with the (delisted) app ‘Spoorzoeker, welk dier was hier’?

A ranger’s journal

In order to make the outside world more appealing to its youngest target audience, Staatsbosbeheer partnered with Evident (now part of Valtech) to bring the ‘Spoorzoeker’ app to life. I joined this project as a visual designer.

I sought inspiration for the appearance in the Uncharted game. The main character in Uncharted, Nathan Drake, sketches and keeps notes of monuments, hints for puzzles, and more. Much like how I pictures myself keeping track of everything I found when I put myself in the shoes of a forest ranger. Thus, its visual style for a rangers’ journal was born.

A screenshot of the loading screen of the app, showing the journal and the app logo.
The journal had a leather cover and contains the embossed logo of Staatsbosbeheer.
An example of a screen with information about a fox.
Dynamic elements such as images were attached to pages with a paperclip.

The look and feel of a journal is established by:

  • Paper as the main texture of the app, along with a handwritten font. Even text that describe a bird’s feather that is stuck on a page with sticky tape resembles the scribble of a ranger.
  • Sketches of animals the ranger might have come across. Also, navigational icons in the main screen seem drawn by hand.
  • A little leaf is that is preserved in the journal, seemingly put between pages by its owner.
  • The loading screen containing the journal’s cover.

Reusing content

The aim of this app was to be informing but playful at the same time. Therefore, it contained several features. Some of which used the same content. For example, one of the most basic features of the app was educational information about forest animals. Detailed information about an animal could be accessed by an alphabetically ordered list.

This content was also used in a quiz. For each of the 10 questions, the app randomly selected the image of a trace (paw prints, leftovers, nests or excrements). Paired with an image for the right and wrong match, players had to answer which animal had been on that spot.

An example of a quiz question, showing faeces of either a deer or a fox.
Each quiz question consisted of an image of a trace (in this case: faeces) and two possible answers.
The screen that shows the final score of the quiz, along with sketches of an owl and a squirrel.
The quiz ended with a screen showing how many questions the player had answered correctly.

Lastly, when users encountered an animal trace in the wild, they could discover from which animal it came with the same information available in the app. In this scenario, a user could traverse a decision tree by answering questions about the type of trace, its size or its shape, for example.

The app was completed by adding a set of handy tools that help making little rangers’ explorations easier: a magnifying glass, flashlight, ruler, compass and camera.

A mockup of the screen that depicts how the user could select one the available tools.
Tools like a magnifying glass, torch and compass were built in.
A screenshot of the compass in the app.
While not directly relevant for the main purpose of the app, a compass helped users get a sense of their whereabouts in the forest.