New look mobile app (coming soon)

Hi everyone,

Hope you've been having an amazing spring.

I just wanted to provide a quick update on the NatureMapr mobile app.

You may know that we've been making considerable investment in this space to try to really improve the mobile app experience for NatureMapr contributors as we know it's a critical tool.

The NatureMapr mobile app is focused purely on one single goal - to make data collection as simple and streamlined as possible.

It must work in remote locations without any mobile reception.

It must be accurate on a large range of possible device makes and models.

And it must be streamlined to use, so you can walk through a rich patch of bushland and record large numbers of important records with a minimal number of clicks.

Our team have been working hard on things like minimising the number of clicks to perform common operations and removing any possible confusion from the mobile app interface by making it more intuitive and natural.

I've been playing with a test version of the new app and I'm super excited to get this out and live for everybody to use.

It is such a better experience than the current version of the app and I'm really enjoying using it! It has actually inspired me to get back out into the field and start reporting all over again because it's such an improved user experience overall.

NatureMapr is also making some large investments in AI and are also working on building AI based species recognition into the main Record screen of the mobile app, SOON.

We know that providing our contributors with real time feedback as to species ID is a really important way to improve the user experience.

If a record arrives from the mobile app with a half reasonable species identification as a starting point, it also serves to protect and conserve the extremely precious time of our volunteer expert moderators, meaning they can spend less time clicking around to identify a record from scratch. So it's a win win.

Thanks to Katarina for all her incredible help putting the new app through it's paces while we get the product ready for release!

Thanks for your patience on this and we can't wait to get the new app out to everyone soon.

Cheers

Aaron.