All work
Product Design
2025
Fieldnote
A field-research app that turns ecologists’ scattered notes into a shared, searchable memory.
Client
Verdant Labs
Role
Lead Product Designer
Timeline
5 months
Services
Research, UX, UI, Prototyping
3.2×
faster survey logging
92%
weekly retention in pilot
40 → 6
forms consolidated
01
The problem
Verdant Labs runs biodiversity surveys across 30 sites in Scandinavia. Each team logged observations on paper, then retyped them into spreadsheets weeks later. Context got lost, photos lived on personal phones, and nobody trusted last season’s data.
The brief was simple to say and hard to do: make logging faster in the field without making analysis harder back at the office.
02
Research
I joined two survey teams for four days in the field, then ran remote interviews with eleven researchers and three data analysts.
Most notes were written with gloves on, in rain, with one free hand.
Researchers cared less about speed than about never losing an observation.
Analysts spent 30% of their week cleaning inconsistent species names.
03
Process
We prototyped on real devices from week two and tested at a lake outside Uppsala every Friday. Big tap targets, offline-first sync and voice notes came out of those sessions, not out of a workshop.
I paired with the lead engineer on a lightweight taxonomy picker that learns each team’s vocabulary, which removed most of the cleanup work downstream.
04
The solution
Fieldnote opens straight into a capture screen. One thumb records a species, a photo and a voice memo; location and weather attach themselves.
A memory, not a database
Every observation lands on a shared map and timeline, so a new researcher can see what was found at a site three springs ago in seconds.
05
Outcomes
After a three-month pilot with eight teams, logging time dropped by more than two thirds and weekly retention held above 90%. Verdant now uses Fieldnote across every survey site and is licensing it to two partner universities.
What I’d do next: bring the map into the analysts’ tools, so the loop closes in both directions.
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