Back in the spring of 2017, I was conceptualizing an idea that could be turned into a business model. To this day I cannot explain why this thought crossed my mind, but I looked at my best friend in the eye and I told him "what if I made a dating app, but for birds?" As asinine of a concept this project was, he seemed to like the idea - so I began by making a simple flowchart of the reasoning behind it. I looked at this from a who, what, when, where, why & how perspective - and it allowed me to look at this from a perspective of a designer that is trying to pitch a product.
From there, I created a storyboard as to how and why this app could be utilized. This was my original (rough) digital storyboard for Birbr - the idea is that the owner notices that the bird is lonely so the owner downloads the app and it allows his bird to be a little less lonely by meeting and dating new birds.
Unfortunately (or fortunately), I left this concept alone for a while. Then, in the spring of 2018, I remembered that I had this idea sitting around in my computer, just waiting to be prototyped into an app. So I did just that.
I began with these four wireframes to give myself a basic idea of what this app could look like.
These wireframes made me realize that maybe this would be more of a companionship app, and not a dating app. There is a lot of scientific evidence to suggest that birds function better when they are socialized, even suggesting that they become anxious or even depressed when they are left alone and bored. I began looking into the idea of wearables for birds that are usually worn to track migratory patterns and thought "why cant this be modified to allow the wearable to track the bird's vitals." I figured that something akin to a heart rate monitor would do, so I began making an app focused around finding new birds to hang out with that would be triggered by changes in the bird's vitals.
Underneath is the group of screens that I created for the app to function with.
A prototype is coming soon, so be on the lookout for that!
