Natural Apptitude

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the Key habitats officer at PTES, we are a conservation charity with a remit of endangered species conservation and within this I run our habitats conservation work

For what projects/services did your company hire Natural Apptitude, and what were your goals?

We wanted a simple, easy to use hedge survey app to help farmers transition to managing their hedges on a traditional hedge lifecycle. It is aimed at farmers and should be a simple process to allow for rapid assessments across a farm. The survey answers guide management advice feedback, which needed to be mapped on a simple map to facilitate farmers writing farm scale hedge management plans. Data from the surveys to be sent to our existing hedge survey website.

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We spoke to a number of different development companies and invited 3 to provide quotes. Natural Apptitude was selected because they had a fantastic experience with geospatial survey apps, understood the complexities of natural history recording, had previous experience with a successful hedgerow app and provided a thorough and impressive quote response. They were also confident that they'd be able to deliver despite quite an absurdly short time frame.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

We had some initial meetings to help describe the project, its aims and timelines. We included team members from our web development team in a later meeting to understand how data would pass from the app to the website and how the shared login process would go. From there we had weekly progress meetings to keep up to date with how development was going.

How many resources from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

Steve F. was our main contact and Developer. Dave K. had oversight of the project and joined for key meetings. Jamie worked on design, ensuring the PTES brand was maintained, as well as creating our app logo.

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

Within 3 weeks of launching we had seen 700 downloads of the app which we were happy about considering we have a very limited target audience and have run promotion exclusively to this limited group. We haven't seen as high a conversion rate of app usage yet, but will continue to promote it an hope it will start being used later in the year.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

We did have a hiccough with timing during the app development, where progress was paused meaning meant we missed our initial and then our secondary proposed completion dates. However, as soon as this emerged, we had a meeting to work out next steps and both progress and communication were faultless after this. The development resumed at a great pace.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Natural Apptitude are unique amongst development companies that I have worked with in that they have an impressive insight and knowledge of natural history recording. Many underestimate the complexities of biological and geographical data, only to be caught out by them at a later date but NA have a deep understanding about not only about the technology elements but understand how this needs to work alongside the biological data recording practicalities.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

I think other than the timing hiccough, everything about the project ran smoothly and we ended up with a great product.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the Head of Communications at Butterfly Conservation, a charity dedicated to saving and conserving butterflies, moths and the environment.

For what projects/services did your company hire Natural Apptitude, and what were your goals?

Our website was created over 10 years ago and was outdated and liable to collapse due to increasing traffic volumes which it was not built for. We also had an app that was no longer fit for purpose.

As our plans are to make the Big Butterfly Count bigger and better each year - to encorage more people to get into nature and do some citizen science - we needed a new framework through which to grow our outreach and citizen science activities. We did not have capacity in-house to achieve this and we hired Natural Apptitude.

How did you select Natural Apptitude and what were the deciding factors?

We carried out a search for vendors who had the correct mix of design skills, development expertise but with a deep knowledge of what was needed for a large citizen science project.

Natural Apptitude was recommended to use by data scientists within and outside our organisation and having looked at their work I was assured by the skill of their design work and the usability of the tech they design.

They also have an excellent track record in working with data-driven NGOs to achieve high targets and ease of use in citizen science web pages and apps. This decided us on using Natural Apptitude.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

The project involved creating two key deliverables: a citizen science smartphone application and a supporting website for our national Big Butterfly Count project. This is the biggest citizen science project focusing on butterflies in the world.

Natural Apptitude took our project brief and designed and built both products for us. They worked closely alongside us at each stage of the process to ensure that the products met all of the project objectives.

The app we commissioned is a hybrid application which provides an ID guide and a form to record spatial data on butterflies seen. It also includes a map showing all of the sightings recorded across the UK.

The website also provides all of these features and focuses on providing a more expansive method for people to view, filter, add and interact with the data collected in the project.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We worked closely with three people. The project manager, a developer and deisgner.

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

Over the course of the Big Butterfly Count we saw the number of counts increase by 25% on 2019. On launch day itself there was an increase of counts of 189% on 2019.

The new website and app were very successful. We have also been nominated for a U.N.'s WSA award -The Big Butterfly Count 2020 was selected as the best and most innovative digital solution from the UK in the environmental category.

The WSA is a unique awards system, selecting and promoting local digital innovation to improve society around the world. https://wsa-global.org/

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timelines.

We had scheduled meetings and kept in contact via email. Timelines were mutually agreed and they delievered exactly as promised.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

All the team were very engaged, willing to listen and work with us to achieve our vision and address our data needs. They were also very familiar with and sympathetic to environmental issues and always extremely helpful to our staff when they needed aid.

They were also quick to respond to any issues.They went above and beyond when implementing the new website and apps and we knew we could rely on them to fix any problems very quickly. .

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

No

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am a senior clinical academic at a leading UK University.

For what projects/services did your company hire Natural Apptitude?

We hired Natural Apptitude to develop a Portable Web App (PWA) for staff and students at the University of Bristol Medical School.

What were your goals for this project?

To develop a mobile app to support clinical pharmacology and therapeutics learning for medical students.

How did you select Natural Apptitude?

We had worked with some of the Natural Apptitude team in their previous roles at the University and felt that their knowledge and experience would be a big advantage in this project.

Describe the project in detail.

The broad plan was to develop an PWA, to be used by students, that captures the frequency of prescription of various drugs that students have encountered from primary and secondary care, whilst on placement. The names and classes of the prescriptions would needed to be auto filled to ensure the correct spelling. The students would need to see their history of entries into the app and compare it against a check list. The data needed to be exportable by the principle investigators so they can check what the students are encountering when prescribing and to check that they are seeing appropriate patients for their training.

What was the team composition?

Our key contacts were Dave Kilbey (Founder and Director), Joe Woodhouse (Chief Technology Officer) and Matt Plumeridge (Developer and Designer)

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

The PWA is currently in beta testing. This was a unique project and Natural Apptitude have so far achieved the core requirements of the project.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Natural Apptitude took a very personal approach during the development of the project. The PWA updates were available for us to try out as they became available. The project meetings were held as video calls. The PWA is currently in beta testing.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Natural Apptitude has a very useful knowledge of the higher education sector. They have a diverse team that offer a wide range of different skills. We found them to be flexible and responsive to the requirements of the project.

Are there any areas for improvement?

No. They delivered on all of the core requirements.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m a research assistant and project manager with University College London’s Extreme Citizen Science Group (UCL-ExCiteS). 

For what projects/services did your company hire Natural Apptitude, and what were your goals?

ExCiteS uses a range of custom developed pieces of software to support its work. One of these is Sapelli - a data gathering tool for participatory research projects, particularly designed for usage by non-literate traditional and indigeneous communities.

Having grown out of a research context, Sapelli wasn't designed with usability in mind at the stage of setting up projects (which would be done by researchers). Specifically, setting up new projects required hand-coding XML. For many fieldworkers, this is a highly impractical task. We hired NA to develop a standalone module of software to give a visual interface for project design.

How did you select Natural Apptitude and what were the deciding factors?

We undertook a competitive tendering process with several vendors. We assessed a written response, followed by interview. We selected Natural Aptitude for their particularly strong understanding of our work and citizen science more broadly, flexibility of approach and demonstrated a clear understanding of the challenges that the project was likely to face.

While other vendors had this in varying degrees, the ability to work with a research group with complex requirements was a deciding factor for us.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

The scope of the work was relatively straightforward - the design and delivery of the required software. ExCiteS were able to provide a set of requirements, with Natural Aptitude responsible for turning them into a robust specification informed by user workshops and interviews that they facilitated.

The project itself was a short, three-month delivery schedule to coincide with restrictions on the grant that funded the project. An agile development methodology was used, with an interim demonstration of the software being shown to users to validate the general look-and-feel, followed by the release of a stable alpha version and one final development cycle.

The software was developed as a persistent web application in line with requirements; specifically, platform agnosticism and offline capabilities.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

Two staff from natural aptitude worked with us. Dave Kilbey acted as a liaison for business purposes and making decisions, whereas Joe Woodhouse lead on the development.

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

The project was on a tight budget with tight time constraints. The software was delivered on time and to specification and users were satisfied with the software's core functionality. Had extra time and resources been available, more time would’ve been spent developing the user experience side of the work.

However, this was an issue Natural Aptitude flagged concerns about the timescales during the procurement process. As it stands, the software was delivered in an impressively short timescale.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timelines.

A generally more light-touch and informal approach was suitable given the small scale of the project. Natural Aptitude were capable in their technical management capabilities and kept the ExCiteS team informed throughout the work. E-mails and slack were chiefly used to stay in touch and they were responsive to and proactive in communication.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Knowledge of the field of citizen science and a willingness to engage with our work. They have strong client focus, being willing to travel from Bristol to meet the ExCiteS team in London on several occasions.

We appreciated their overall professionalism, willingness to partner with us in shaping the project rather than acting as an arms-length software developer. In that came willingness to be candid about the challenges of the project, management of risks.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

Not to my mind!

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm a Reader in Developmental Psychology at the University of Bristol. I conduct research on behavioural, emotional and environmental factors that are involved in the development and maintenance of continence problems in children and young people.

For what projects/services did your company hire Natural Apptitude?

I hired Natural Apptitude to build a smartphone app to support behaviour modification (bladder training) for the treatment of urinary incontinence in young people.

What were your goals for this project?

First-line treatment for urinary incontinence is bladder training (standard urotherapy), which involves behaviour modification to establish a regular schedule of drinking and toileting.

There is evidence that bladder training is effective, but success strongly depends on adherence, self-motivation and clinician support, which our research shows is often lacking. Treatment failure results in rising costs to the NHS (secondary referrals, incontinence pads, medication, surgery).

We developed URApp to improve adherence to bladder training. Our aims were:

1. To design and build an app to support self-management of urinary incontinence (UI) in young people and to improve adherence to bladder training.

2. To produce an app that is acceptable and engaging, which provides discreet reminders for toilet visits and drinking, a diary function to record toileting and drinking, charts to track progress, and a reward system to aid motivation to adhere to bladder training.

3. To provide a cost-effective, self-management solution for accessible, personalised and effective behaviour change support for young people with UI.

How did you select this vendor?

Natural Apptitude were recommended to me by the University of Bristol's Research IT team.

Describe the project in detail.

Natural Apptitude were involved throughout the entire project, from the initial planning to the optimising and evaluating stages.

First, we ran a series of participatory co-design workshops to identify user requirements. We met regularly with the Natural Apptitude team to discuss the feasibility of the desired app functions and the optimal ways of implementing them within the app. We then produced a wireframe in UXPin and Natural Apptitude used this to build an initial prototype of URApp.

We then evaluated URApp through in depth qualitative research with young people and clinicians. We employed an iterative optimisation approach, which was aimed at improving the acceptability and feasibility of URApp and making it engaging for users.

We were in regular contact with Natural Apptitude throughout this stage to discuss the refinements to the app design. URApp has been developed for iOS and Android and development is now in the final stage before release.

What was the team composition?

The team at Natural Apptitude comprised a project manager, programmer and a designer.

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Feedback from young people:

• “It got a lot better. During the day I have stopped having accidents. My symptoms were getting better each week.”
• “I drink more in the mornings now, rather than lots before bed if I haven’t had enough, which can be problematic at night time.”
• “It helped me drink more regularly and space my drinks out throughout the day.”
• “The most motivating things for me were seeing my progress over time and charting the (drinking and toileting) data”

Feedback from clinicians:

• “I think we would use it on every single child that came to our clinic, anyone that came to bladder training, we would direct them all to it and say this is part of it"
• “It’s difficult to get young people to engage with recording diary information, including frequency/ volume charts, with something a bit more modern you’d get more engagement and more data”
• “I’m already thinking of kids I could use this with”
• “I think it’s really easy to use, I mean I’ve used it and I’m not tech savvy. Yeah that’s pretty good and they can set whatever reminder they want themselves”

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Project management and communication was excellent throughout the entire project.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Natural Apptiude really understood the health problem we were trying to support and the potential value that an app could have for young people struggling to manage continence problems.

I was impressed by the insights they provided into the best ways of implementing the desired functions and making them easy to set up and use. The input from their designer was also excellent, and we've received very positive feedback about the overall look of the app.

They have succeeded in producing a simple-to-use app that is engaging and visually appealing.

Are there any areas for improvement?

We were very satisfied with their work; the timescale, and the end product.

Please describe your company and your position there.

The RSPB is the largest nature conservation charity in the United Kingdom, delivering successful conservation, forging powerful new partnerships and inspiring others to stand up and give nature the home it deserves.

I head up a team within our Conservation Data department and part of my role involves empowering the public to take positive conservation action using technology and data.

For what projects/services did your company hire Natural Apptitude?

We needed to replace and improve our existing Swift Survey citizen science web app (which allows members of the public to record sighting of nesting Swifts). This involved completely recreating the system on a new platform and migrating over the existing data. In addition, we wanted to integrate this new system with a mobile recording app, also created by Natural Apptitude.

What were your goals for this project?

We wanted to create a new system with all the necessary functionality of the old one, but with significant improvements, especially in terms of usability and flexibility. We wanted the new platform to be sustainable and one which we could continually build upon.

How did you select this vendor?

Natural Apptitude have a proven history of this type of work and they have an expert understanding of what is required by citizen science projects such as this. They had already created the Swift Mapper mobile app pro bono for the Swift recording community and demonstrated a clear interest in making the web app a similar success.

We had seen the quality of their previous work and had glowing reviews from a conservation partner who had also worked with them on a similar project. They were able to accommodate our very tight timescales and offered excellent value for money.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Natural Apptitude designed and developed a web application based on their citizen science platform Coreo. Several meetings were held to prioritise and add detail to the high-level requirements previously gathered by the team.

NA then provided a set of initial screen design mock-ups which allowed us to choose the type of approach we wanted to take with regards to the user interface. Once that decision was made, they set up a prototype system where we could continually view active developments and provide feedback.

At all times throughout the development we were able to contact the team at NA and request changes and amendments to be made. These requests were quickly actioned which gave us much more control over how the site developed.

Once the system was nearing completion, NA helped us test the system and gather feedback from the testers so that bugs and improvements could be factored in before the final launch.

In addition to the above, they also amended the existing Swift Mapper mobile app to mirror any relevant changes necessitated by developments in the web app.

What was the team composition?

The team consisted of two members of staff from Natural Apptitude and roughly five from RSPB. RSPB provided business analysis, project management, testing and user resource whereas Natural Apptitude provided project management, design, development and testing resource.

RSPB managed the overall project (which contained large elements of non-technical work to be delivered by RSPB staff) and Natural Apptitude project managed the technical/development activities. The project took an informal approach using some of the most helpful aspects of Agile.

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

The Swift Mapper app has only been live for a month, but in this time we have already received overwhelmingly positive feedback from the public and local Swift conservation groups. Much of this feedback has concerned the usability of the apps which was a key area we wanted to see improved.

The number of users signing up and submitting sightings is already in the thousands. Staff on other projects have been so impressed that they have enquired about creating similar applications for their work.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Project management was split between a PM from Natural Apptitude and one from RSPB. The NA project manager managed the technical and development elements while we managed the overall project and tasks that fell outside of Natural Apptitude's remit. This approach worked well and enabled each party to focus on delivering the outputs best suited to their areas of expertise.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Natural Apptitude clearly understand what makes an excellent citizen science app and they patiently helped us to turn our vision into reality. More importantly though, they genuinely cared about our cause and about producing a quality product that would make a real difference. They went above and beyond and surpassed our expectations.

Are there any areas for improvement?

I can’t think of any.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a veterinary pathologist and I work for an educational institution in Scotland. I manage a team that investigates dead and stranded marine animals.

What challenge were you trying to address with Natural Apptitude?

One of the things we do is monitor whales, dolphins, and porpoises that hit the beach of Scotland to try to find out why they died. There are biases that are associated with the stranding process, one of which is that anything that comes up on a beach has to be reported by members of the public in order for us to be able to do any of the work that we do.

Some beaches are heavily trafficked, and others are very rarely visited, so we wanted a way to take advantage of some of that traffic. By creating a reporting app where citizen scientists can log the location and description of anything they find on the beach, we would be able to focus on the less popular areas and increase our efficiency.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They created an iOS and Android app that served the dual function of allowing individuals to report to us anything they find during a walk on the beach, as well as tracking the frequency of each beach’s visitation.

The app needed to work online and to be very user-friendly, as well as to be able to operate on different operating systems. We provided them with sketches and scope instructions through Google docs and they worked from those.

What is the team composition?

I think there were at most four members of their team assigned to the project at any given time. Our main point of contact was Dave (Founder & CEO, Natural Apptitude).

How did you come to work with Natural Apptitude?

One of our colleagues has used them in the past for a different system app, so we thought their experience with science institutions would make them a good fit.

How much have you invested with them?

So far, we’ve spent about £18,000 (approximately $23,000 USD).

What is the status of this engagement?

We started around September 2018 and are continuing to wrap up and make sure everything is working just right.  

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

The app was delivered, though it was a little bit late because we had a lot of problems specifying exactly what we wanted them to do. It has taken them a long time to iron out some of the glitches, including distance tracking, which was one of our most important features.

Despite the technical issues, we got a lot of coverage in news sources around our launch, and we have about 200 users generating data for us now, which we are happy about.

Now we are just working on fixing the design and the few remaining operation problems. The biggest of those is that since Android 10 was rolled out, the app has simply stopped loading on devices using that system. We’re currently in a back-and-forth with them about how much to pay for fixing that. Because of that, it doesn’t entirely seem that our app is as good as it could be.

How did Natural Apptitude perform from a project management standpoint?

They are good at being able to deliver exactly what they have been told to deliver, but they are quite bad at communicating when there were going to be delays and at helping us understand where we needed to improve the specification of our requests. It’s sort of like giving instructions to a robot because they would do what you asked and then just stop until you asked for something else.

What did you find most impressive about them?

At a fundamental level, they are very good at documenting exactly what it is they are going to do, as well as being able to triage information. If you give them a list of things, they can take it and prioritize, determining which ones they can do right away, and which need some thought as to how to accomplish. I think that’s actually very difficult.

Technically, they are very capable. They also offer a really nice online database for a reasonable price that allows you to host your app without having to reinvent the wheel and create an entirely new bespoke data management system.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I’ve contacted other app scientists who have used Natural Apptitude and the feedback has been reasonably similar. The general consensus is that they could do a much better job of being proactive, asking questions instead of just stopping when they finish each request, and helping new developers understand how their process works. It takes blood and sweat to get to a good product, and you don’t feel particularly well-supported in the process.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I would advise anyone working with Natural Apptitude to be very, very clear right from the outset about what it is they want. Keep a very strict timeline so that communication is set up and if things have to be released on time, they are made aware that they have limited time to complete the work.

I would also suggest that you have discussions at the very beginning as to what sort of maintenance contracts will be required, what the costs of those contracts are, and what exactly is covered under them. For people who are totally new to app development, you have to be very careful in how you go about the process.